AZ cuts hundreds of scientists

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 CommonsThe company told the linkurl:__Philadelphia Inquirer__;http://www.philly.com/philly/business/86127882.html yesterday (March 3rd) that the layoffs are part of a plan to shutter an entire research group, focused on identifying candidate compounds for psyc

Written byBob Grant

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Image: B.gliwa via Wikipedia Commons

The company told the linkurl:__Philadelphia Inquirer__;http://www.philly.com/philly/business/86127882.html 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, linkurl:told;http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/9/1/69/1/ __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."
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Expert advice on surviving $ mess;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55191/
[13th November 2008]*linkurl:Chasing Challenges;http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/9/1/69/1/
[September 2008]

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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