Amid plans to transfer manufacturing for an investigational vaccine to a souped-up plant in Pennsylvania, GSK is parting ways with more than 100 staffers at a Massachusetts facility that will pivot to focus exclusively on R&D.
All told, 150 employees at GSK’s Binney Street site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are set to be laid off, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification report recently filed with the Bay State. The staff reductions are slated to begin in early October and will carry on through the end of March 2026, according to the layoff notice.
The Binney Street site currently employs about 200 people and focuses on vaccine development, ranging from discovery to manufacturing, according to GSK’s website. The site is currently dedicated to work on the multiple antigen-presenting MAPS system GSK picked up in its $2.1 billion upfront buyout of Affinivax back in 2022.
The staff reduction comes as GSK plans to relocate that MAPS manufacturing work—currently centered on a midstage, 24-valent pneumococcal vaccine candidate—to its site in Marietta, Pennsylvania, which is the subject of an $800 million expansion project unveiled last fall.
“Following a previous announcement that we would move manufacturing for one of our pipeline assets from our Binney St, Cambridge site to our site in Marietta, we note that our Binney Street site will transition to become an R&D site only,” a GSK spokesperson told Fierce Pharma in an emailed statement.
“We have always anticipated the need to add industrial scale manufacturing capacity to be ready, provided our assets in our pneumococcal MAPS portfolio get approved,” the spokesperson explained. “The Marietta facility, representing our largest US manufacturing investment to date with state-of-the-art capabilities, is an industrial-scale campus that offered space for expansion.”
Despite the planned production transition, the Binney Street site “continues to be an important facility in our R&D network, as part of our presence in the greater Boston area,” the GSK spokesperson added.
As for the Marietta facility, GSK in October said it would spend up to $800 million to double the size and capacity of the production site. The project involves the build-out of two new facilities that will both bolster GSK’s existing drug product capabilities at the site and bring on drug substance production for the first time.
The upgraded manufacturing campus will be used to crank out commercial drugs and vaccines, and it will also house an R&D pilot plant to produce medicines for clinical trials, GSK said at the time.
In its original announcement, GSK noted that it planned to hire about 200 new staffers to the Marietta team in tandem with the expansion. GSK has said it plans to get its new drug substance facility up and running by the end of 2027, with the drug product expansion slated to come online by the end of 2028.
Elsewhere, GSK last week confirmed with Fierce Biotech that “a very limited number of positions will be impacted” across the company’s global R&D workforce as the British pharma reallocates resources to support development and launch plans through the beginning of the next decade.