Third-quarter biotech job picture

In the third quarter, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced a $600 million commitment for a new medical science research center in collaboration with the University of California (UC) Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University. Headquartered in San Francisco's Mission Bay, with a satellite site at Stanford, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is the first philanthropic science investment made by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

New York–based Pfizer will invest $350 million to build the Pfizer Global Biotechnology Center in Hangzhou, China, slated for completion in 2018. The center, to be built using a prefabricated module system developed by GE Healthcare, will be Pfizer's first in Asia and will focus on biosimilar production.

Finally, in August Novartis announced that it would dissolve its cell and gene therapy unit, a group that had worked on advancing one of the leading chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-) T-cell therapies now in the pipeline. The move will affect 400 workers across several different Novartis affiliates. The company said that most of the group would be redeployed but that about 120 would be let go.

Advertised biotech and pharma sector jobs in the job databases tracked by Nature Biotechnology during the third quarter of 2016 are shown in Tables 1 and 2. Other downsizings within the life sciences industry are shown in Table 3.

Table 1 Advertised openings at the 25 largest biotech companies

Table 2 Advertised job openings at the ten largest pharma companies

Table 3 Selected biotech and pharma downsizings