Drug maker AstraZeneca is pink-slipping approximately 550 Wilmington, Delaware-based researchers and their support staff in a move to help balance the company's books and save it $1.9 billion per year by 2014.

Image: B.gliwa via Wikipedia Commons

The company told the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday (March 3rd) that the layoffs are part of a plan to shutter an entire research group, focused on identifying candidate compounds for psychiatric diseases.

The staff in Wilmington will lose their jobs by the end of 2011. The impending cuts likely explain why the pharmaceutical company declined to quantify its new R&D hires when we recently requested it for an upcoming project.

In mid-2008, AstraZeneca's Vice President of Continuous Improvement and Business Performance, Karen Gotting-Smith, told The Scientist she hoped her newly created position would help the company streamline its drug development process while increasing quality and lowering costs. "My role now is to work with a very large organization, globally complex, with challenging diseases that they're developing drugs for to overcome those challenges," Gotting-Smith told The Scientist. "We all have to rise to the challenge of expectations."


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