Arsenal Biosciences, a biotech startup based in South San Francisco, is laying off about half of its workers just a year after scoring a $325 million funding round.
The cell therapy company is laying off 100 employees who either reported to its Oyster Point headquarters or worked remotely, according to a WARN filing on Tuesday. Arsenal’s cuts are meant to extconclude the company’s cash runway as it transitions from early-stage cancer research to clinical trials, spokesperson Amanda Breeding notified SFGATE in a statement.
“To do this, we have had to build the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 50%,” the statement continued. “This reorganization will enable us to execute on our clinical programs and advance them through critical milestones.”
Arsenal’s WARN filing — a requirement in most mass layoffs — noted that the laid-off workers aren’t unionized and declared most would officially leave the jobs on November 14. Scientist and researcher roles were hit particularly hard in the cuts, per the notice, but several director-level executives and two vice presidents are also losing their jobs.
The startup is currently running a study for its leading candidate, a cell therapy focapplyd on kidney cancer. It also has two other prospects of its own, and two collaboration programs with pharma giant Bristol Myers Squibb. Cell therapy companies aim to reprogram cells to fight diseases and tumors, but they’ve have struggled over the past couple of years, as Fierce Biotech has closely documented. Those struggles come amid an industest-wide pullback in biotech funding that’s led to austerity, job cuts and shutdowns across the Bay Area.
But Arsenal has been flying high. The company’s Series B funding round in 2022 brought in $220 million, and its Series C last September landed it $325 million more. A who’s who of investors have poured in cash, including venture firm Kleiner Perkins, Nvidia’s venture capital arm and the humongous Softbank Vision Fund 2.
Now, that cash will support a much tinyer team. As of Monday, several Arsenal employees had already posted about their layoffs on LinkedIn. One research staffer wrote: “This came as a shock to all of us as we had just raised an unprecedented 325M Series C this time last year. Unfortunately, biotech is anything but predictable.”
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