More biopharma layoffs are hitting New Jersey, this time from Merck & Co., in the latest phase of headcount reductions attributed to its $3 billion cost-cutting plan announced last July.
The latest layoffs are touching the company’s global headquarters in Rahway. In total, some 88 staffers who report to Merck's home base will face job cuts in September, according to a recent Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice filed with the state of New Jersey.
“Today, Merck initiated the next phase of personnel impacts related to its multiyear 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 since 2018 in our New Jersey operations, which manufacture medicines and vaccines that contribute to saving and improving lives worldwide.”
The pharma’s sweeping cost-cutting effort aims to save $3 billion by the end of 2027, with plans for those savings to be “fully reinvested” to support new product launches, Merck said in a quarterly earnings report last summer.
“We will be growing our spend over time, but we want to do it productively and efficiently, and that’s why we’re looking to reallocate money and resources from the slower-growth areas of the business to fully fund into the fast-growing areas of our business,” CEO Rob Davis further explained on a conference call at the time.
The company later confirmed that the reorganization would result in around 6,000 layoffs in “some areas of our global workforce,” a spokesperson told Fierce last July, impacting about 8% of Merck’s total headcount. The company also telegraphed plans to “continue to optimize its manufacturing network by aligning the geography of its global operations with its customers” and to reduce its global “real estate footprint.”
Merck’s focus on new launches comes as biosimilar competition to its megablockbuster cancer med Keytruda creeps closer. Several cheaper versions of the med are already in development, with the floodgates for Keytruda biosimilars likely to open in 2028 in the U.S.
Keytruda and its 44 indications make up around half of Merck's current total sales and contributed a whopping $31.7 billion to Merck’s total 2025 revenue of $65 billion last year.
The drugmaker is also trimming teams tied to its Gardasil vaccine, in February announcing layoffs of 147 workers at a vaccine manufacturing plant in North Carolina amid waning demand for the shot.
Merck isn’t the only Big Pharma undertaking a major cost-cutting mission, nor is it the only one to slash its New Jersey headcount in the last few weeks. At the end of May, Johnson & Johnson said it would let go of 56 workers at its New Brunswick headquarters due to the divestiture of its orthopedics business last year.
Also in May, Novartis reported 76 planned layoffs at its own Garden State headquarters in East Hanover, which impacted a “select number of employees within our Biomedical Research organization,” a spokesperson said. BioMarin, for its part, is cutting 58 roles at the Princeton, New Jersey, headquarters of the recently acquired Amicus Therapeutics as it continues “carefully evaluating how to align our organizations for long-term success,” a spokesperson said.