– Roche is cutting 340 jobs worldwide – Switzerland is also affected
The group is restructuring its research and development. This has consequences for the department responsible for larger clinical studies.
Published: February 8, 2024, 7:00 p.m
In Switzerland it affects almost 100 jobs: Roche employees in a laboratory.
Photo: PD
The pharmaceutical company Roche is restructuring its development of new drugs and wants to cut around 340 jobs worldwide. Employees found out about this at a meeting on Thursday. In Switzerland it will affect almost 100 places, as informed circles in this editorial team report.
In addition, temporary staff employed by Roche will also be cut, according to Roche circles. This is said to affect even more positions than the internal cuts. The number of externally hired employees at Roche has increased in recent years.
The dismantling should be completed in the next few months. Consultations with employee representatives in the affected countries are ongoing. Roche himself did not comment on this.
Overall, the number of employees will remain stable in 2024
Overall, the number of employees in the group is expected to remain stable in the current year.
Head of development Levi Garraway also announced a reduction in July 2021. At that time, 300 to 400 jobs were affected. Roche employs a total of around 100,000 people, including 15,000 in Switzerland. Overall, the number of employees in the group is expected to remain stable in the current year. This applies to both divisions, i.e. pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.
The new Roche boss Thomas Schinecker wants to make the development of drugs more efficient. He also relies on artificial intelligence.
Photo: Goergios Kefalas (Keystone)
The current reduction refers to the department responsible for planning and conducting larger clinical studies. In the so-called clinical phases 2 and 3, possible new medications are tested for their effectiveness and tolerability on a large number of test subjects.
Roche experienced three major setbacks in the development of new drugs in 2022: In the last and most expensive phase 3 clinical trial, therapies turned out to be unsuccessful – one against Alzheimer’s and two against cancer.
Roche boss stops or accelerates projects
Roche boss Thomas Schinecker, who has been in office for a year, is now restructuring the organization of research and development. In general, projects should be able to be canceled earlier if their probability of success is low. Artificial intelligence should help minimize the risk.
Schinecker, on the other hand, is pushing forward promising projects in order to be able to bring new drugs onto the market as quickly as possible. Schinecker said at the group’s annual financial media conference that he wanted to make better use of resources in research and development, which would sometimes lead to reallocations.
His goal is to increase Roche’s productivity. To this end, he is investing more in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Roche is also developing its own chatbot. Chat-GPT or other chatbots cannot be used by Roche because they do not meet the security criteria of pharmaceutical companies.
Research at Roche Isabel Strassheim has been a business editor at Tamedia since 2019. She reports from Basel primarily about the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. More info
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2024-02-08 21:39:07
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