The advancement of Pfizer’s antibody-drug conjugate portfolio has not spared the former Seagen site—and those who helped develop the therapies—from layoffs.
Pfizer is laying off 100 employees in Bothell, Washington, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice posted by the state.
“As we’ve previously communicated, Pfizer is improving its R&D productivity and efficiency with a sharpened focus on opportunities and simplifying the way it works through digital enablement and automation, which we believe will deliver the greatest impact for patients,” a Pfizer spokesperson told Fierce Pharma.
The Bothell campus used to be Seagen’s global headquarters before its $43 billion acquisition by Pfizer in 2023. The site included office buildings and lab and warehouse space for administrative and R&D purposes, as well as a biologics manufacturing facility for production of Astellas-partnered bladder cancer ADC Padcev, according to Seagen’s 2022 annual report.
Before disclosing the 100-person layoff round, Pfizer had just vacated a 61,000-square-foot office building at the Bothell campus, according to a Puget Sound Business Journal report in July. Prior to that, Pfizer had stopped construction of a 270,000-square-foot plant in the nearby city of Everett last year, impacting 120 workers.
Reeling from declining COVID product sales while simultaneously trying to deleverage its balance sheet following the huge Seagen buyout, Pfizer is undergoing a sweeping cost-cutting plan initially launched in 2023. In April, the New York pharma increased the target of the cuts to $7.7 billion through 2027, including $4.5 billion that will be realized by the end of this year.
Besides reductions in selling, general and administrative (SGA) functions, Pfizer anticipates making $500 million in R&D cuts by the end of 2026, with those savings to be reinvested into the pipeline, the company said in its April update.
The latest layoff round at the Seagen campus comes as Pfizer is busy advancing Seagen’s ADC pipeline. A phase 3 readout is nearing for sigvotatug vedotin, a potential first-in-class ADC targeting integrin-beta 6, in second-line nonsquamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The study, coded Be6A Lung-01, recently finished enrollment and bears a primary completion date in March 2026, according to ClinicalTrials.gov.
Meanwhile, Pfizer launched another phase 3 trial last month testing whether adding sigvotatug vedotin to Merck & Co.’s Keytruda would work in patients with first-line NSCLC who have high levels of PD-L1 expression.
Separately, in its second-quarter update earlier this month, Pfizer laid out plans to start pivotal programs for its PD-L1 ADC, dubbed PDL1V, in first-line head and neck cancer and in second-line NSCLC this year.
Additional planning is underway at Pfizer to potentially pair its ADCs with the PD-1xVEGF bispecific that the company just bought for $1.25 billion upfront.
On the commercial front, the Padcev-Keytruda combo just delivered a phase 3 win as a perioperative treatment used before and after surgery in muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) patients who are not eligible for or declined cisplatin-based chemotherapy.
But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing during Pfizer’s ADC voyage. The pharma giant ended development of a B7-H4-directed agent earlier this year, triggering a $1 billion impairment charge, while taking another $200 million write-off related to the HER2-targeted disitamab vedotin.