After winning an approval decades in the making last year—and shuffling its executive roster throughout 2025—Geron Corporation is scaling back its head count.
Under a restructuring plan unveiled Thursday, the Foster City, California-based drugmaker will lay off roughly one-third of its current workforce of 260 employees. Geron expects the downsizing operation to be “substantially complete” in the first quarter of 2026, according to a Dec. 11 press release.
The company figures the move will allow it to log 2026 operating expenses below those projected for 2025, with savings expected to start rolling in during the first three months of next year.
Geron said in November that it now expects total operating expenses for 2025 to clock in between $250 million and $260 million.
The pharma noted that it expects to incur restructuring-related charges from the downsizing effort, which it aims to detail further in an upcoming securities filing.
“After my first four months at Geron, the leadership team and I have assessed the business with the goal of streamlining our organizational structure to advance our strategy and create long-term value,” Harout Semerjian, Geron’s CEO, said in a statement. “We are implementing these changes from a position of strength and in the spirit of prudent fiscal management.”
Semerjian—who took the reins at Geron back in August—went on to thank the affected employees for their contributions and reinforced the company’s priorities around maximizing the launch of its myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) drug Rytelo and advancing its late-stage IMpactMF trial, which is studying the same asset in JAK inhibitor relapsed/refractory myelofibrosis.
Semerjian added that Geron is also “exploring opportunities for making Rytelo available outside the U.S.”
It took Geron more than three decades to score an approval for Rytelo (imetelstat), which finally arrived by way of an FDA nod for the telomerase inhibitor in MDS last June. Evaluate has previously estimated that sales for Rytelo could reach $737 million in 2028.
In an ominous sign for the launch, however, Geron’s chief commercial officer, Anil Kapur, announced plans to depart the company “to pursue other interests” less than two months after Rytelo’s FDA green light in July 2024.
The company has experienced more executive turnover since then, with Geron’s prior CEO, John “Chip” Scarlett, exiting at the end of March. At the time, the company did not elaborate on the reason for Scarlett’s departure.
Then, after replacing Scarlett with Semerjian on a permanent basis in August, the company in October revealed that its chief operating officer, Andrew Grethlein, Ph.D., and its replacement commercial chief, Jim Ziegler, were also on the way out at Geron. Geron immediately tapped a replacement for Ziegler in biopharma commercialization vet Ahmed ElNawawi and simultaneously appointed three new executives to its leadership team.
In a third-quarter earnings release last month, Geron’s new CEO, Semerjian, acknowledged that the company needs to continue pushing to realize Rytelo’s potential.
“There is work ahead of us to fully maximize the value of this therapy and ensure Rytelo reaches more patients,” he said in a statement. “Geron is positioned, with our realigned leadership team, to strengthen commercial execution, increase both physician and patient awareness, and drive Rytelo sales in the U.S.”
For the three months that ended in September, Geron reported net product revenue of $47.2 million and a net loss of $18.4 million.