Laid off from Astellas.

What Astellas layoffs have meant for employees

The labs Astellas paid for didn't stay open. It paid $387 million in cash for Agensys in 2007, $4 billion for OSI Pharmaceuticals in 2010 and $102.5 million for Universal Cells in 2018, then announced the closing of each one's American lab within a decade. Astellas Gene Therapies, the unit it formed from Audentes Therapeutics after buying that company in 2020, started shutting its biomanufacturing plant in 2024, BioSpace reported. If you joined Astellas through one of its purchases, these closings show the decision coming from the parent company years after the deal.

When work has moved, the people haven't always moved with it. The Seattle roles Astellas said in 2024 would go to Tsukuba, Japan, were for employees at the Tsukuba location to fill, BioSpace reported, and a spokesperson said in April 2026 that Universal Cells' research in Japan was conducted inside Astellas' Tsukuba Research Center rather than at a site of its own. The Seattle closing letter said only a handful of positions would move, to South San Francisco and Westborough. So word that a team's work is going to another Astellas site doesn't, by itself, say whether anyone on the team goes too.

At Agensys and in Seattle, landing another job inside Astellas was the one way to stay. Astellas told Endpoints News in 2017 that it would keep no Agensys employee past February 2018 unless they applied for and received a position elsewhere in the company, and the Seattle letter said anyone who accepted an internal transfer or a role at another Astellas Group affiliate before their separation date wouldn't be separated. In Seattle, seniority didn't offer a second way. The employees there had no union, and the letter said no one could displace another employee by seniority. If your site is closing, consider applying for other Astellas jobs early, since in Seattle only a role accepted before the separation date kept someone from being separated, and a job at another Astellas Group affiliate counted the same as one inside Universal Cells.

A closing on this kind of schedule can keep people working under notice for a long time. Every Seattle employee had notice as of the letter's date, while the letter expected separations to continue in waves through April 2028, and Astellas said the staff essential to the Agensys wind-down would be kept through the first quarter of 2018. The Seattle letter promised wages and benefits through each person's last day. If your separation date falls in a later wave and you're weighing an outside job, the pay and benefits you'd keep collecting until your date are part of that choice, along with any severance terms that reach you before then.

The reasons Astellas gave were about its research and its sites. It said the 2013 restructuring was designed to "further enhance the ability to generate innovative drugs," an Astellas research executive said the field had evolved when Agensys wound down, and a spokesperson said in 2024 that the company regularly reviewed its organizations and operations to increase efficiency. The Agensys wind-down and the Seattle closing each covered a whole site, and the Seattle letter listed everyone at it, from a lab aid and research associates to the heads of quality assurance and technical operations. If your job ended in one of those closings, telling a future employer the site closed is accurate, and explaining a layoff covers what to say next.

Benefit rules for the two states with recent Astellas closings sit on California unemployment benefits and Washington unemployment benefits, with unemployment benefits by state covering every other state.