Pharma jobs shed over patent cliff

The pharmaceutical sector has shed up to one fifth of its staff as the effect of the patent cliff hits the viability of large sales teams.

An estimate from the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association put the level of job losses as high as 20% of the total workforce employed in the pharma sector with sales staff bearing the brunt of the cuts.

Director of commercial Affairs with the IPHC Orlaith Brennan pointed to the massive fall in the price of Lipitor when it came off patent, resulting in an 85% fall in price.

“This obviously has an effect on our member companies who are having to react by reducing their staffing levels to reflect the changes. The interim results would suggest that the number of jobs could be down by anything up to 20% over the last 3-5 years,” she said.

The loss of the sales forces is causing other departments to be taken out of Ireland.

“We are also noticing a trend for companies to centralise their support functions in a regional head office outside of Ireland (typically the UK), so jobs in specialist areas such as regulatory affairs are also being lost. It is a worrying trend as these are jobs which are generally occupied by science or business graduates who are highly skilled,” said Ms Brennan.

Chief Economist with Merrion Alan McQuaid said that the patent cliff “is a problem that not going to go away”.

“We are down about €1bn or €2bn in trade last year and then you have the knock-on effects in the economy with job losses resulting in less tax take, less spending and on top of that then people have to sign on,” he said.

Without the earnings from the blockbuster drugs expensive sales departments are not sustainable, he said.

The managing director of sales placement, Seamus Farrelly, said that the large field sales staff that pharmaceutical companies have traditionally kept on the road to call to local GPs have all but disappeared in other markets and Ireland will soon follow suit.

He said that in America the they have begun to lease whole sales force to launch drugs and push them at various times and that this trend it on the way here.

“They will start outsourcing GP rep-ing, you cannot afford to pay somebody €40,000 to €50,000 to flog generics. Believe you me it’s going to go that way,” he said.