A combination of increased sales and cost-cutting measures led to a better time for life science companies in the third quarter of 2009. Amgen, despite decreased sales of its anemia drugs, increased its third-quarter profit by 24% through lower costs in its research and sales units. Likewise, Pfizer's profit jumped 26% on cost cutting, Celgene reported a 58% profit increase based on sales of its cancer drugs, Merck & Co. posted a bigger profit due to slightly higher sales and a huge gain from selling a business, and Abbott Laboratories' profit was up 36%.

On the venture capital front, investment in the third quarter kept pace with the previous quarter but was still down 25% from a year ago. Biotech topped the information technology and cleantech sectors, receiving a total of $905.1 million across 104 transactions.

All this suggests that the dire straits affecting small-cap biotechs in the second quarter may soon show signs of abating. For the life science industry as a whole, we saw a continuation of the slight hiring increase at the 25 largest biotechs (Table 1) compared with the previous quarter (Nat. Biotechnol. 27, 672–673, 2009), according to three representative job databases. Amgen and Genzyme continue to post the highest number of job openings, followed by Biogen Idec and Celgene.

Table 1 Who's hiring? Advertised openings at the 25 largest biotech companies
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In addition, there were big jumps in the number of full-time employees at the largest biotech companies over the previous year, including Monsanto (+2,900 FTEs), Genzyme (+1,000), Celgene (+756), Gilead (+462), Actelion (+462), Qiagen (+379) and Biocon (+229). The largest drop in employees belonged to PerkinElmer and Amgen, which recorded 800 and 700 fewer full-time employees, respectively, over the previous year. The ten largest pharma companies also continue to hire new employees (Table 2).

Table 2 Advertised job openings at the ten largest pharma companies
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Notable job reductions over the last three months among biotechs and pharma companies are shown in Table 3. In addition, on June 24 Monsanto announced plans to cut 900 jobs, amounting to 4% of its workforce, a part of a company restructuring that will create a new division for its struggling Roundup business.

Table 3 Recently announced job reductions in the biotech sector
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Nature Biotechnology will continue to follow hiring and firing trends in the coming year.