Beijing-based BeiGene has partnered with Guangzhou GET Holding Corp. to form BeiGene Biologics. The joint venture will construct a RMB 2.2-billion ($330-million) manufacturing facility for BeiGene's biologics in Guangzhou and fund development of biologic candidates in China. BeiGene will also contribute biologic assets to the collaboration. The move comes as Chinese regulators require that biologics be manufactured in China as a prerequisite for approval.

Since the city and state governments of New York announced more than $1 billion in initiatives in December 2016 to help turn New York City into a top-tier life science hub, Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, NJ, USA) has teamed up with New York State and the New York Genome Center to announce the launch of JLABS @ NYC in 2018, its sixth startup incubator (after Houston, Toronto, San Diego, the Bay Area and Massachusetts). The 30,000–square foot facility is slated for the fashionable SoHo area and will host up to 30 biotech, pharma, medical device and consumer health companies with an emphasis on 'cross-sector' technologies.

Paris-based Sanofi and Lonza Group (Basel, Switzerland) will collaborate on a new large-scale mammalian cell culture facility for monoclonal antibody production in Visp, Switzerland. The companies will share equally in the initial investment of CHF 290 million ($287.8 million), with the facility set to open in 2020.

Retrophin has announced it will close its office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by year's end and consolidate its operations to San Diego to centralize expertise and improve efficiency. The rare disease treatment developer will relocate some of its 135 employees.

Advertised biotech and pharma sector jobs in the job databases tracked by Nature Biotechnology during the first quarter of 2017 are shown in Tables 1 and 2. Other downsizings within the life science industry are shown in Table 3.

Table 1 Who's hiring? Advertised openings at the 25 largest biotech companies
Table 2 Advertised job openings at the ten largest pharma companies
Table 3 Selected biotech and pharma downsizings