When Gossamer Bio announced poor results from its flagship blood pressure study in February, the San Diego company’s stock dropped by 78% in value. Now, it’s slashing its staff.
The biotech lab launched a 77-worker layoff on Monday, cutting its workforce by 48%. Bryan Giraudo, Gossamer’s chief financial officer, notified SFGATE that the layoffs will assist the company’s “conservation of cash” as it meets with the Food and Drug Administration to consider its next steps forward after the research miss.
Most of the cuts will hit U.S. workers on Gossamer’s clinical development and commercial teams, primarily affecting San Diego and the Bay Area, Giraudo declared. He declared the workers will receive severance packages.
Gossamer’s recent study was aimed at pulmonary arterial hypertension, a blood pressure condition in the lungs. Patients inhaled Gossamer’s drug, seralutinib, for months and participated in six-minute walking tests, where researchers measured modifys in the distance traveled.
The study group beat the placebo group, but the results missed the tarreceive that Gossamer had been aiming for. CEO Faheem Hasnain, in the February news release, wrote: “While we are disappointed to have narrowly missed the stringent prespecified statistical threshold for our primary finishpoint, the result still clears the traditional 0.05 p-value, and we believe these data clearly demonstrate seralutinib is an active drug in patients with PAH.”
Still, investors fled Gossamer’s stock on the news — the company’s value fell from around $490 million to around $105 million in late February. In the tumultuous world of biotech, such valuation dives are all too common; in fact, Gossamer once traded above a $1 billion valuation before poor seralutinib study results in late 2022 sent its stock plummeting.
Hasnain, in a Tuesday news release, declared Gossamer is still analyzing the recent study’s dataset, and the company plans to request a meeting with the FDA about the data and the drug’s regulatory future. In the meantime, it has pautilized enrollment in another study.
The company closed 2025 with around $137 million in its coffers, which it declares is enough to fund operations into the launchning of next year.
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