MassBioEd News
Former biotech professionals share strategies for weathering the storm amid continuing layoffs
By Hannah Green – Reporter, Boston Business Journal
August 13, 2025
When Christine Romano moved to Somerville, she was excited to be living in a region that is basically “Hollywood for nerds.”
Romano has a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and worked at Metagenomi before moving to Massachusetts for a job at Cambridge-based Stylus Medicine. She worked as a senior scientist at the gene-editing company for about 20 months before she was laid off on Dec. 12, 2024.
She’s still on the job hunt, but is now doing so from Toronto, where she is staying with family. Boston is expensive to live when you are employed, Romano said, let alone when you’re job searching.
“You come here with a STEM background and a dream and just really hope you’re going to be able to situate in the culture and make an impact,” Romano said. “And I’m glad I got to be there for a while. I just wish it had lasted longer.”
Romano is one of many thousands of Massachusetts life sciences employees caught up in the widespread layoffs that have taken place over the past few years. Fraught public markets, restricted venture capital funding, economic uncertainty and FDA shakeups have left life sciences companies shedding jobs in an effort to stay afloat.
The Business Journal recently spoke with several Massachusetts biotech employees who have lost their jobs in the last year about navigating endless job applications, the financial realities of their situation, and pivoting to survive these trying times.
‘Worse than anyone could have anticipated’
Romano stopped counting how many tailored job applications she had sent in about six months after she lost her position, at which point she was already over 100. If she added in applications from Indeed or LinkedIn Easy Apply, she’d easily double that number. She’s gotten to late-stage interviews, but nothing has come through yet.
“I remember being told by a career coach in early 2025, it’s probably going to be three to six months. … It’s been nearly eight months for me, and I have no leads, no prospects, because 2025 (has been) actually worse than anyone could have anticipated,” Romano said.
Widespread layoffs are now commonplace in the life sciences sector, with cuts coming from early-stage biotechs to large pharma companies. Across 2024, more than 4,940 workers lost their jobs at Massachusetts life sciences companies. That’s up from about 3,800 layoffs in 2023 and the 2,500 eliminated positions in 2022.
The cuts have continued unabated in 2025, with 1,300 Massachusetts workers impacted in the second quarter
after about 1,000 people lost their jobs in Q1.
Overall job growth continues
It isn’t all doom and gloom. There is still hiring happening, points out Sunny Schwartz, CEO of MassBioEd.
“The workforce is remaining steady, which means, with all these layoffs, there’s also hiring, or else … the numbers would be declining, which we haven’t seen,” Schwartz said.
Massachusetts has long had a steadily growing life sciences workforce. That growth took a hit last year, but the overall job numbers didn’t decline.
While Massachusetts still outpaced the nation in terms of job postings and employment growth last year, the
number of jobs in the Bay State’s life sciences sector was largely stagnant in 2024, per a report from MassBioEd, a nonprofit educational foundation established by trade group MassBio. The report counted over 143,000 life sciences jobs in Massachusetts last year.
Sarah Sutton lost her job in March 2025 as a managing director at Argot Partners, a public relations firm serving the life sciences industry.
“As funding was drying up, companies are tightening budgets, laying people off. So there’s a downstream impact on the service providers in the industry,” Sutton said.
Sutton wanted to continue working with small biotechs rather than finding an in-house role at a pharma company. But she also recognized that agencies come with high overhead costs that biotech companies are looking to avoid right now. So she decided to make a go at starting her own company.
“I think it’s scary for a lot of people. Because this was an industry that was really booming for so long, and so I think being laid off is scary, especially if you have a family,” Sutton said. “I went into this field because I thought it was a really stable industry to support me and my family.”
Leila, who asked for her last name not to be used, is a Ph.D.-trained molecular biologist who lost her job at QuidelOrtho in January 2025 when the diagnostics company shut down its Beverly office. She described the job market as completely different from even just a few years earlier. When she was completing her Ph.D. at the University of Idaho in 2022, she had five job offers.
Now, she is looking for any job that will allow her to provide for her daughter as a single mom. Any time Leila doesn’t spend searching for a job, she is working as a delivery driver for DoorDash.
“Research is my passion and I care about it a lot, but if I cannot find a scientific job, I need anything to just support myself and my daughter,” Leila said.
Her message to others impacted by the biotech layoffs: You’re not alone, and it’s time to stick together.
“This market is very tough, but stay persistent, open minded, and it’s very important to stay hopeful and just don’t be afraid to reach out to other people for help,” Leila said.