More biopharmaceutical layoffs are occurring in New Jersey, this time in the latest round of job cuts from Merck & Company’s $3 billion cost-cutting plan announced last July.
Recent job cuts also impact the company’s global headquarters in Rahway. A total of approximately 88 staff members at Merck’s headquarters will face job cuts in September, according to a recent Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice filed in New Jersey.
“Merck today began the next phase of human resources impact related to a multi-year optimization, as announced in July 2025,” a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma in an emailed statement.
The spokesperson continued: “We remain committed to New Jersey as we continue to employ more than 8,000 people in the state. We have also invested nearly $3 billion in New Jersey operations since 2018, producing medicines and vaccines that help save and improve lives around the world.”
The drugmaker’s intensive cost-cutting efforts aim to save $3 billion by the end of 2027, with savings planned to be “fully reinvested” to support new product launches, Merck & Co. said in its quarterly earnings call last summer.
“As we increase our spending over time, we want to do so in a productive and efficient manner. That’s why we’re looking to reallocate funds and resources from slower-growth areas of the business in order to put more money into the faster-growing areas of the business,” CEO Rob Davis further explained on a conference call at the time.
The company has since said the restructuring will result in around 6,000 layoffs across “some of our global workforce,” impacting around 8% of Merck’s total workforce, a spokesperson told Fierce last July. The company also cabled plans to “continue to optimize its manufacturing network by aligning the geography of its global operations with customers” and reduce its global “real estate footprint.”
Merck’s focus on new product launches comes as biosimilar competition for its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda looms. Several cheaper drugs are already in development, and the floodgates for Keytruda biosimilars are likely to open in the U.S. in 2028.
Keytruda and its 44 indications account for about half of Merck’s current total sales and contributed a whopping $31.7 billion to Merck’s 2025 total sales of $65 billion last year.
The company has also cut teams related to its Gardasil vaccine, announcing in February that it would lay off 147 employees at its vaccine manufacturing plant in North Carolina due to declining demand for the vaccine.
Merck isn’t the only big drug company on a major cost-cutting mission, nor is it the only big drug company to cut jobs in New Jersey in recent weeks. Johnson & Johnson announced in late May that it would lay off 56 employees at its New Brunswick headquarters following the sale of its orthopedics business last year.
Also in May, Novartis reported 76 planned layoffs at its Garden State headquarters in East Hanover, which affected “certain employees within our biomedical research organization,” a spokesperson said. Meanwhile, BioMarin is cutting 58 positions at the Princeton, N.J., headquarters of recently acquired Amicus Therapeutics and continues to “carefully evaluate how to align the organization for long-term success,” a spokesperson said.
