Pfizer/Wyeth Layoff Update
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After announcing yesterday that it will be reorganizing and closing 6 of 20 R&D sites worldwide, Pfizer/Wyeth announced today that as many as 2000 R&D scientists will lose their jobs. I suspect that others will lose their jobs in the next few months or so.
The Pfizer/Wyeth and Merck Schering Plough mergers signal the beginning of the end of the traditional vertically integrated pharmaceutical business model. It is evident that pharma is shifting away from its almost 100 year focus on R&D and manufacturing to less labor intensive and costly activities like advertising, marketing, sales and distribution—things that drug makers have excelled in the past decade or so. Innovation will likely no longer come from within but from external sources including academia, biotechnology companies and third party vendors including CROs and CMOs.
While the loss of thousands of R&D scientists will have little impact on the productivity and operations of life sciences companies themselves, it has serious implications for academic institutions that train life sciences graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In the past, PhD scientists who were unable to find academic jobs too refuge and found gainful employment in the life sciences industry. However, American industrial R&D jobs are becoming harder and harder to find as larger companies continue to outsource those activities, to Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. And, the competition for the remaining jobs is becoming increasingly fierce. Put simply, academic institutions have to begin to realize that we no longer need as many PhD-trained life scientists as we have in the past. At present, there is a glut of PhD life scientists in the US, many of whom can’t find jobs. Perhaps, this should be taken into account before graduate school admissions committees determine the number of new graduate students they will admit next year.
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!!!!
Good post. I think some of the innovation will come from within the drug companies, but I agree that it will increasingly come from outside and brought into the drug companies for development.
Sadly, I also agree about the job for life scientists comments - competition for drug discovery positions will be intense. I have a feeling that this will not be considered by universities still wanting the cheap labor of grad students and post docs to work on their professors' research projects.
Certainly a fear I was facing when I finished my pharmaceutics PhD early this year. What a time to enter the job market. I think my saving grace was that I had several years of industrial experience before I left for grad school, making my resume all the more plumped up. Maybe this is something for future students to consider. Perhaps work in industry first, to see if it is something you really want to spend your life doing, before dedicating 5 years of your life to post grad studies in that field.
Gentleman:
I retired from Wyeth (Lederle) in 2007. I started with Lederle after finishing my tour in Vietnam in 1968. I still stop by to see some of my friends at Pearl River. From what has been told to me 400 jobs in R&D will disappear in R&D from Pearl River and 200 jobs will disappear in Manufacturing. This will eventually be confirmed via two sources: 1)WARN Act requirement and 2)Notification to local 143C of Chemical Workers Council which I was a member of. Manufacturing will at least have some cushion since some of those jobs are unionized and there will be a negotiated settlement with local 143C. I can tell you that the organics and vaccine groups would work hand in hand at the site. Many of the jobs in R&D will be transferred to both India and China putting yet another blow to a Pfizer owned facility. I myself did not have a college degree but I was grateful to those scientists that worked on our campus since their discoveries would eventually come on to our manufacturing floor (Centrum, Vaccines, etc.) and provided our family with a good standard of living. I do worry about the scientific future of the US since I forced my son to do well in school and get a Ph.D in microbiology and not worry about having a job in manufacturing. I think our tax structure is screwed up in that we keep on providing big incentives for these multinationals to keep these high paying jobs for a decade until they eventually get purchased by another multinational who then moves the jobs to China and India.