By Hannah Green
Last year, Massachusetts’ life sciences industry saw its slowest job growth since 2017 as the industry faced economic headwinds.
The Bay State’s biopharma workforce consisted of 116,937 employees in 2023, according to the latest “Industry Snapshot” report put out by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, or MassBio, on Tuesday. The trade group found that this was up from 113,994 employees in 2022, an increase of 2,943 people, or 2.6%.
That’s the lowest number of jobs added since 2017, when the state’s life sciences industry grew by 2,895 employees compared to the prior year (at the time, however, that represented a 4.3% increase over the previous year).
Since 2017, Massachusetts has seen an increase of more than 4,000 employees each year — including a jump of over 22,000 employees from 2020 to 2021.
But for MassBio, the continued employment growth in 2023 is a positive sign nonetheless for the resiliency of Massachusetts’ biotech ecosystem.
“With all of this, and everything we’ve heard about company layoffs and closings, the fact that we gained net new employees in Massachusetts in 2023 should be thought of as a win,” Ben Bradford, head of external affairs at MassBio, told the Business Journal.
Among early-stage companies, Bradford said a lack of venture funding is causing biotechs to be more cautious about hiring.
“As companies are not bringing in as much money from the venture community, they’re probably not hiring quite as much as well,” Bradford said.
Venture capital funding for Massachusetts biotechs has also slowed.
Massachusetts-based companies raised $3.26 billion in venture capital during the first half of 2024, per MassBio’s report. That’s a 12.6% drop from the first half of 2023, and the lowest total since 2019.
Some larger companies in Massachusetts have also announced reductions in their workforces in the last year, including Takeda Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Biogen Inc.
Largest local biotech employers
Among Massachusetts life sciences companies, Takeda Pharmaceuticals Inc. remained the top employer with 6,214 Bay State employees as of this summer. That’s down slightly from 6,290 in the prior year’s report. Takeda (NYSE: TAK) is in the midst of a “significant, multiyear efficiency program” it announced earlier this year. This plan includes cutting around 860 of its Massachusetts positions.
Moderna overtook Sanofi in this year’s report as the second largest employer. The Cambridge drugmaker reported 4,400 Massachusetts employees, while Sanofi listed 4,326.
The other top Massachusetts life sciences employers include Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals.
MassBio said its employment data is from membership reports and surveys conducted June through August 2024.
Biomanufacturing, R&D trends
Specific sectors in Massachusetts’ life sciences industry fared better than others in terms of job growth.
The biomanufacturing sector saw a loss of just over 2% of the workforce in 2023, according to the report.
“While it went down a couple percent, it only went down about 200 people in total in 2023. So I would attribute that to just general business cycles,” Bradford said. “But I do have great faith and belief that our heavy pipeline in advanced therapies will give Massachusetts an opportunity to continue to grow its biomanufacturing workforce, because those are therapies where the research and development being in close proximity to the manufacturing, at least at an early stage, is beneficial.”
Meanwhile, Massachusetts’ R&D workforce grew 3.67% in 2023 compared to 2022. Nationally, the biotech R&D workforce decreased by 0.5%. MassBio found that Massachusetts had just 900 fewer R&D jobs than California last year.