AstraZeneca to cut 550 jobs in Wilmington

About 550 AstraZeneca scientists and support personnel in Wilmington will lose their jobs by the end of 2011, as the pharmaceutical giant phases out a basic research group that focuses on identifying compounds potentially valuable in psychiatric medications.

The antipsychotic Seroquel, recently AstraZeneca's second-largest seller, was initially identified by the Delaware research-and-development group, located at the same campus that houses AstraZeneca's U.S. headquarters. An atypical antipsychotic, Seroquel brought in $4.87 billion in 2009, about 15 percent of the company's worldwide sales of $32.8 billion.

But the London-based drugmaker recently announced plans to scale back its global R&D efforts as part of a broader restructuring designed to save $1.9 billion a year by 2014. Central to that plan was an effort to rank its R&D programs and eliminate those deemed least attractive.

Tony Jewell, an AstraZeneca spokesman, said the programs were scored according to the prevalence of the diseases their efforts aimed to address, the company's prospects for discovering and developing useful new compounds, and "the future willingness of payers to pay for those medicines - I guess that would be a marketability question."

AstraZeneca said yesterday that it would continue to invest in R&D in all its current therapy areas, seeking medications to treat cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal diseases, as well as cancer, inflammation, infection, and neuroscience disorders.

However, AstraZeneca said it would "cease discovery efforts" for compounds to treat specific diseases within those broader categories, including several psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety.

In other categories, AstraZeneca said it would drop projects aimed at treating thrombosis, acid reflux, ovarian and bladder cancers, systemic scleroderma, and hepatitis C, as well as R&D aimed at developing new vaccines, except for influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Jewell said the psychiatric-drug laboratory being eliminated represented about a third of AstraZeneca's R&D workforce in Delaware. He said the company had no plans to scale back its R&D work there on later-stage product development. In January, AstraZeneca said it had 146 projects in its pipeline, including 103 "in the clinical phase of development."

Jewell said he could not specify when the layoffs would take place, or how many employees would be offered positions at other research sites. AstraZeneca said that it expected growth at its Boston research facility "as employees transfer from other sites."

All told, the company currently employs about 4,000 people in Delaware, Jewell said.

"We remain committed to Wilmington," Jewell said. "It's the center of our U.S. business, and we maintain a strong U.S. and global R&D presence here."