Eisai, the Tokyo-based global biopharmaceutical company, said only a “handful” of the company’s 200-plus job cuts announced on Friday would involve the company’s 190 employees in North Carolina.
Suzanne Grogan, an Eisai media relations representative, said the cutbacks will sever about 25 percent of the 850 employees in Eisai’s U.S. commercial and regional corporate services units.
“The realignment will not affect our manufacturing or R&D units,” she said. Most Eisai workers in North Carolina work at the company’s biomanufacturing facility in Research Triangle Park. The small number of North Carolina layoffs involve people in a regional corporate services group at the RTP site.
That site got a boost in December 2012 when Eisai and Biogen signed a 10-year manufacturing alliance, in which Biogen started making some oral solid dose products for both companies at Eisai’s neighboring factory in RTP. Biogen also hired about 50 of Eisai’s 225 employees in early 2013 as part of the lease agreement, adding to Biogen’s RTP workforce of more than 1,000.
The agreement came just a week after Biogen opened a new five-story, 190,000-square-foot building to consolidate employees onto its RTP campus.
Massachusetts-based Biogen and Eisai both established their first pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in RTP in 1995.
Note: Veteran journalist Jim Shamp is director of public relations for the N.C. Biotechnology Center
(C) N.C. Biotech Center
