Novartis Announces Closure of its San Diego Research Facility

Pharmaceutical Multinational, Novartis, has filed notice to close its San Diego R&D facility by mid-2025, eliminating 100 jobs. The facility, which is currently being used for oncology, neuroscience and immunology R&D, will be moved to other existing U.S. locations. The company says it plans to maintain a presence in San Diego.

The announcement follows an April 2023 announcement where Novartis said it planned to cut 680 roles, with 440 of those in Switzerland.

Pharmaceutical giant Novartis is shutting down a San Diego facility as part of a broader restructuring of the company’s drug development segment.

In the first phase of layoffs, the Basel, Switzerland-based company cut 29 San Diego workers at 10210 Campus Point Drive, according to a July 5 WARN notice filed with the state. Novartis said the winding down of the San Diego site eventually will eliminate about 100 jobs and will be complete by mid-2025.

Novartis leases about 9,400 square feet at the 79,263-square-foot building owned by Alexandria Real Estate Equities, according to real estate tracker CoStar. This facility focuses on product development for gene therapies.

“Novartis recently communicated plans to evolve our global Development organization, with the intent to drive sustainable, leading R&D performance and bring meaningful medicines to patients even faster,” a company spokesperson said in an email to the Union-Tribune. “To achieve this, a set of changes to build future capabilities and access global talent pools will be implemented over the next 2 to 3 years, with parallel build-up and reduction of roles in certain locations.”

With the closure of the San Diego facility, Novartis will be “consolidating (technical research and development) capabilities at existing U.S locations.” While the site at Campus Point Drive is closing, the company spokesperson said Novartis will continue to have a research presence in San Diego “with a team of approximately 580 associates.”

The company’s other locations include the Sorrento Valley site of recently acquired DTx Pharma, a laboratory in Carlsbad and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in Torrey Pines.

Novartis said in its 2023 annual report that it employed about 76,000 people as of Dec. 31.

In April, Reuters reported Novartis’ plans to cut about 680 roles in its development organization, which is the department that brings drugs from the research stage to commercialization. Most of these jobs, about 440, are in Switzerland. As many as 240 jobs will be cut in the United States over the next two to three years.

The recent reductions in the development segment at Novartis are separate from a restructuring plan announced in 2022 that would cut 8,000 jobs in an effort to save about $1 billion.

Novartis is not the only large biopharmaceutical company to shut down a San Diego facility. In May, Illumina competitor and gene-sequencing company Pacific Biosciences announced the closure of its San Diego office in an effort to save millions of dollars.

Takeda Pharmaceutical Company said last month that it is closing its local research and development facility and laying off 324 people as part of a broader restructuring.

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