Two major pharmaceutical companies are cutting U.S. jobs this summer, with Novartis telegraphing 76 more layoffs at its New Jersey headquarters and AbbVie cutting 85 more employees in its beauty division.
Novartis’ round of job cuts in the Garden State is the third in recent months at the Swiss company’s U.S. headquarters in East Hanover. Seventy-six employees will lose their jobs on Aug. 21, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) recently filed with the state.
The layoffs, reported in May, follow 114 employees in March and are on top of 60 layoffs at the facility in April. All previously reported cuts were scheduled to take effect from the summer until late November.
“Novartis continually evaluates opportunities to support our growth strategy as a focused, innovative medicines company. We regularly evaluate our organizational structure to ensure alignment with our evolving priorities,” a Novartis spokesperson told Fierce Pharma. “We have informed a select number of employees within our biomedical research organization of the individual impact. While this was a strategic decision, we recognize that this is difficult news for those affected and we remain committed to treating our colleagues with fairness, respect and compassion.”
Novartis has pledged to cut 8,000 jobs worldwide in 2022 in an effort to become a “leaner and simpler” organization, and has continued to cut jobs since then, including in New Jersey. For example, last March, 427 people were laid off at the company’s U.S. headquarters as it restructured its cardiovascular commercialization model. According to a recent Fierce Pharma analysis, the company is only one of two large pharmaceutical companies that consistently slimmed down each year from 2021 to 2025.
Meanwhile, on the opposite coast of the United States, AbbVie reported 85 permanent layoffs at its Irvine, Calif., research and development site, set to take effect July 20, according to a recent California warning notice.
AbbVie’s Irvine mine serves as the U.S. headquarters for Allergan Aesthetics. The 54-acre, 1 million square foot campus is listed as the company’s center of excellence for aesthetics, neurotoxicology, neuropsychiatry, migraine and eye care research, according to the company’s website.
The facility’s latest job cuts come nearly a year after the company cut 202 employees at the facility last July due to “a reorganization to better position Allergan Aesthetics for continued leadership within the dynamic aesthetics industry,” a spokesperson told Fierce Pharma at the time. Prior to that, 99 layoffs took place in 2022. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new layoffs.
AbbVie acquired Allergan and its popular Botox and other products in 2019 for $63 billion. After recent sales declines in the Allergan segment, including a 6.1% decline in 2025, sales increased in the first quarter of 2026, increasing 7.6% to $1.2 billion.
Late last month, the company’s efforts to bring a fast-acting Botox follow-on to market were ignored by the FDA, which requested detailed information about the product’s manufacturing process in a full response letter.
