Amgen's $27.8B Acquisition Is Shrinking, One Lab at a Time
Amgen is subleasing the Horizon Therapeutics R&D hub it envisioned as a rare disease powerhouse, while Evotec axes 800 jobs and four sites. Two very different companies, one uncomfortable truth about biotech's post-COVID reckoning.
A 192,000-Square-Foot Ghost Town
Two years ago, Horizon Therapeutics envisioned its Rockville, Maryland facility as a powerhouse: a 192,000-square-foot R&D hub that would eventually house around 200 scientists working on rare disease breakthroughs. Amgen liked the vision so much it bought the whole company for $27.8 billion.
Now Amgen is trying to sublease the building.
A WARN Act notice filed on March 9 confirmed that 22 employees at the Rockville site will lose their jobs by May 8. It's a small number on paper, but it tells a much bigger story about what happens when a mega-acquisition meets the reality of corporate integration.
The Slow Fade of a $27.8 Billion Bet
When Amgen closed the Horizon deal in October 2023, the pitch was compelling. Horizon brought three first-in-class drugs to the table: Tepezza for thyroid eye disease, Krystexxa for chronic gout that won't respond to other treatments, and Uplizna for a rare autoimmune condition. Amgen projected it could squeeze $500 million in pre-tax cost savings out of the combined operation by roughly 2026.
The savings are arriving. Just not the way Horizon's scientists probably hoped.
An Amgen spokesperson offered the standard corporate cushion: "We are making organizational changes that will affect some roles at our Rockville research and development location. These changes are part of a broader effort to align our operations with our research strategy to best serve our patients."
Translation: the research strategy no longer includes this particular research site. The fact that Amgen is actively seeking tenants for the space tells you everything the press statement doesn't. And reports suggest the combined sales of Horizon's top three drugs have fallen short of analyst expectations, which doesn't exactly strengthen the case for keeping extra labs open.
Meanwhile, in Germany: Evotec Is Taking a Chainsaw to Its Own Org Chart
If Amgen's cuts feel like a paper cut, Evotec's restructuring is more like surgery without anesthesia.
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The German drug discovery company announced on March 10 that it's slashing roughly 800 jobs and closing four sites by the end of 2027. That's nearly one-fifth of its remaining workforce of around 4,500 people. The sites on the chopping block: Framingham, Massachusetts; Lyon, France; Abingdon, UK; and Munich, Germany.
This isn't Evotec's first round of cuts, either. The company already eliminated 600 positions between March 2024 and June 2025 (originally planned as 400, because restructuring plans have a funny way of expanding). It also shrank from 19 sites to 14 during that same window. Now it's going from 14 to 10.
The restructuring program, somewhat ironically named "Horizon," targets €75 million in annual savings by 2027. The catch: it'll cost about €100 million in one-time restructuring charges spread across 2026 to 2028. Think of it as spending a dollar to save 75 cents per year. The math works eventually, but it takes patience.
Why Evotec Can't Stop Cutting
CEO Christian Wojczewski, who took the reins in July 2024, inherited a company that had spread itself too thin. Under his watch, Evotec exited gene therapy entirely, sold off a Phase 2 drug candidate, and abandoned clinical development to refocus on what it does best: early-stage drug discovery and preclinical work.
The financial picture explains the urgency. First-half 2025 revenue dropped 5% year-over-year, from €391 million to €371 million. The core discovery division saw an 11% slide as demand stayed "soft" (biotech's polite way of saying clients aren't calling). 2026 guidance of €700 to €780 million actually represents a step backward, landing below what analysts expected.
Wall Street's reaction was brutal. When the 800-job plan went public, Evotec's stock dropped nearly 17% in morning trading, hitting €4.38. That's the lowest it's been since September 2016. The company is betting it can hit €1 billion in revenue and a 20% adjusted EBITDA margin by 2030, but right now, 2030 feels like a very long four years away.
Biotech's Uncomfortable New Normal
Amgen and Evotec are very different companies operating at very different scales. One is a pharma giant trimming the edges of an acquisition; the other is a mid-sized services firm fighting for survival. But they're both responding to the same force: the post-COVID hangover that continues to reshape biotech's workforce.
The numbers across the industry are staggering. In 2025, biopharma layoff rounds jumped 16% compared to the prior year. Bayer alone eliminated 12,000 positions. CSL planned 3,000 cuts. BioNTech targeted up to 1,350.
The pattern is familiar by now: companies that hired aggressively during the 2020-2021 funding boom are still working off that excess. Clinical failures, revenue misses, and investor pullback have forced a reckoning. U.S. employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January 2026 alone, the highest January figure since 2009, with healthcare taking an outsized hit.
Into early 2026, the bleeding continues. Trackers counted 9 companies announcing cuts in February and 7 more in March, including everything from Evotec's massive restructuring to f5 Therapeutics shutting down entirely (fewer than 10 employees) to Amgen's 22-person trim in Rockville.
The Bigger Question Nobody's Asking
Cost-cutting makes the spreadsheets look better. It satisfies investors in the short term. But here's the tension that doesn't show up in a WARN notice: every scientist who gets laid off, every R&D site that goes dark, represents a bet that those particular research programs weren't going to pay off anyway.
Sometimes that's true. Sometimes companies really did overexpand, and trimming back is the responsible move. But Horizon's Rockville facility was supposed to be a center of rare disease innovation. Evotec's shuttered sites employed people working on the earliest stages of drug discovery, the kind of work that creates the pipeline everyone will desperately need five years from now.
Biotech runs on a simple (if brutal) cycle: spend money on science today, hope it pays off in a decade. When the industry enters cost-cutting mode this aggressively, the savings are real and immediate. The cost, on the other hand, might not become visible until the pipeline runs dry.
Some analysts at William Blair predict momentum could return in 2026 if clinical successes get rewarded and pricing pressures ease. That's possible. But for the 22 people cleaning out their desks in Rockville and the 800 getting notices at Evotec, the turnaround can't come fast enough.
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