Avanir files WARN notice for 100+ layoffs from California as merger with parent Otsuka looms
04 Nov 2022
Acquisition
Another biotech is axing part of its workforce, joining dozens more over the last year.
California-based Avanir Pharmaceuticals filed a WARN notice in late October detailing 109 layoffs in California at its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, on the south side of Los Angeles. Avanir did not respond to multiple queries from Endpoints News.
The biotech issued another WARN notice earlier this year, when it outlined 16 layoffs back in August that would become effective October 14. The biotech did not immediately respond to a query from Endpoints at the time.
This comes after Otsuka subsidiary Otsuka America Pharmaceutical announced on October 21 that it would be integrating Avanir into its business, effective January 1, 2023. Otsuka acquired AvanirAvanir back in 2015 for $3.5 billion.
Avanir, founded as Lidak Pharmaceuticals back in 1988, is a CNS biotech and the maker of Nuedexta, a drug FDA-approved for pseudobulbar affect, a disease characterized by uncontrollable crying or laughing. Nuedexta is at the center of a $116 million settlement in civil and criminal penalties that Avanir agreed to pay in 2019.
That settlement revolved around claims from whistleblowers that Avanir reps had paid doctors to prescribe the drug in nursing homes as a way to control dementia patients, an unapproved indication for the drug. On top of that, the DOJ said at the time that Avanir violated anti-kickback law by paying a doctor to prescribe Nuedextra to beneficiaries of federal healthcare programs, among other examples. Avanir did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
Reeling from a hefty civil and criminal settlement, Avanir stumbles into PhIII Alzheimer's failure
Aside from Nuedexta, AvanirAvanir has been focusing on a candidate for agitation in patients with Alzheimer’s Dementia (currently in Phase III trials). Other drugs being investigated include drugs for negative symptoms of schizophrenia, intermittent explosive disorder and negative behaviors linked to traumatic brain injuries.
Avanir joins a host of companies — both big and small — in trimming companies and removing jobs. One of the other more recent examples is in the case of Galapagos just this week, where CEO Paul Stoffels cut 200 jobs in order to move the company “forward, faster.”
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