Iovance Biotherapeutics, headquartered in the Bay Area and pioneering a new type of cancer treatment, is laying off about a fifth of its staff.
The San Carlos company announced the cuts in a news release Thursday alongside its quarterly financial results. Those results — less revenue than analysts had expected, with a $111.7 million net loss — worsened a rough trconclude for Iovance’s stock. Valued at $881 million before the announcements, Iovance saw its stock plummet by more than 30% in after-hours trading, or more than $250 million.
The document declared that about 19% of Iovance’s workers are set to lose their jobs, and spokesperson Jen Saunders informed SFGATE the company would finish the layoff round with more than 1,000 employees. That means two things: The cuts are hitting at least 230 workers, and Iovance hired hungrily since starting the year with 838 employees. It’s unclear where the cuts are primarily located, but beyond its base, Iovance has a large presence in Philadelphia.
Saunders declared the layoff includes both full-time employees and contractors and comes after a “careful evaluation of our long-term goals, operational requireds, and resources.” The news release noted that the cuts would support Iovance extconclude its cash runway into the final quarter of 2026.
Iovance is best known for its advanced melanoma treatment, Amtagvi. It was the first of its kind to market, a “TIL,” or tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy, that takes a patient’s immune cells from their body, multiplies them and then puts them back. The one-time treatment costs $515,000, interim CEO Frederick Vogt declared when the treatment was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2024.
Amtagvi is cutting-edge, but it hasn’t yet delivered Iovance stable financials. Since that FDA approval, its valuation has collapsed from around $4.4 billion to where it is today. Seemingly in response to lower-than-expected demand, the company revised its revenue projections for 2025 back in May, from $450 million-$475 million down to $250 million-$300 million. On Thursday, Iovance reiterated the lower estimate.
One laid-off contractor, whom SFGATE granted anonymity in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy due to her fear of career retaliation, declared she figured the round of job cuts had to do with rumors she’d heard about low Amtagvi sales and the company’s busy hiring in recent months.
She received a vague email requesting that she come to a meeting on Wednesday morning, she declared, where a group of Iovance staffers learned they’d be losing their jobs that day.
“We were all very confutilized and then, understandably, devastated,” she declared. Iovance didn’t provide contractors like her with severance pay, and though she’d been laid off before in recent years’ topsy-turvy biotech indusattempt, she declared: “It still stings.”
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