Hi everyone,

Question pertaining to holiday shutdowns: do you have one and is it paid? Our company requires full time employees to take PTO between Christmas and New Year's. HR claims it is standard, but my friends (mostly in tech) disagree strongly. They all have shutdowns that are paid. I'm lobbying to change this policy, but it is dependant on gathering data.

Would people be willing to share:

1. Do you have a holiday shut down?

2. How long does it last? For example, ours typically lasts Dec 24 to Jan 1.

3. Location?

4. Is it paid or are you forced to use PTO?

Thanks in advance!

*Edited some language for clarity

Hello all,

I recently read this blog post Healthcare Policy Plans : Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump 2024 , and it was pretty eye-opening. On one side, Kamala Harris has plans to expand the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). People at work were saying this is great for patient but could have some serious long-term consequences, particularly for federal healthcare centers. These centers often rely on the differences in drug costs to sustain their revenue, so changes could result in significant funding cuts. According to the projections I've heard, this might even lead to massive layoffs in 2026 and 2027.

On the other hand, Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” policy aims to overhaul federal regulations around pharmaceuticals and public health agencies. But here’s where it gets even crazier —they haven’t shared many details yet. RFK Jr. mentioned that Trump promised him control over agencies like the HHS, CDC, and FDA, and potentially even USDA. That makes me even more worried because handing over control of these agencies could lead to massive changes in how public health and biotech regulations are handled. Also is RFKJr. even qualified for that, what do you guys know about him ? is he good or bad?

What are your thoughts? I’m especially curious about what people working in federal health agencies think about these potential changes

What are some other locations in the US where one would be able to have a life in this industry.

When the market bounces back are there areas that might have promising biotech growth? I've always heard of the research triangle in NC but not sure if that is strong or reliable? I'm curious if there are any other places in the US that see startups, R&D and biological sciences growing. I'm less interested in manufacturing (bio PhD).

I've been in Boston for a while and their housing problem is absolutely fucked, with no remedies in sight. I don't want to be 50 trying buying my first house..

My hometown of Austin seems to have fixed their housing issue but biotech is extremely slim.

I'm entering stages in my life where I want(need) to start a family and buy a house but that seems unattainable in Boston/MA. I don't want to leave biotech after investing years of my life and education but I might have to.

Thanks for reading my desperate rant. Sincerely, a sad and broke millennial questioning everything.

To add some positivity to this subreddit, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on which biotech companies you believe are well-positioned for significant growth and innovation in the coming years. What specific qualities or developments make you optimistic about their future? Are they good acquisition targets?

This is a follow up to a post I made earlier today about if there was anyone in these fields who’d be willing to talk to me and run me down on the field. But I never realized so many people here also viewed it in a negative light(rightfully so though it’s a highly skeptical field). So it made me want to ask the community a new question, which is that I have recently gotten in contact with a few scientists from such people say that it can be in 10 years where things start to get rolling. What are your views?

A thread called r/biotech should discuss more biotechnology and less about jobs, how to get into industry, and employer/comp reviews. r/biotech mirrors the biotechnology industry, where science takes a backseat to the business. I want this thread to discuss cool biotechnology, new inventions, and anything you think people in r/biotech will find cool.

Director at a mid sized biotech - recently over the past few months it seems like everyone at my place is super on edge, flying off the hook at everything, starting fights about minor shit. Part of it is that management wants to launch multiple products next year without enough resources in place and i think people are afraid of failing and don't have enough time to do anything

Is it like this everywhere? I'm strongly considering quitting by next month bc the workload is insane and environment has become very toxic

Since 2022, big tech has spent over 150 billion+ investing in infrastructure, in house AI models and acquiring AI startups, etc. OpenAI has raised $13 billion and is losing money on an unprecedented scale as it has yet to really come up with a use case that people will actually pay market prices for.

Despite this insanely large investment, the results so far are a few Large Language Models which continue to get things wrong and generally have not developed at the speed predicted..see the recent OpenAI launch of "strawberry" which most commentators say was pretty disappointing and in no way a step change.

Considering what AI drug development companies say they are doing, on a fraction of the budget, convince me that it is not the latest house of cards ready to start crumbling down after a few high profile trial failures.

This is a bit off-topic, but how homeowner-friendly is this industry? I have a few years of industry experience after PhD and postdoc and have finally saved enough money for a downpayment for a house, but the math is still not mathing to me...

I am supposed to have enough savings to cover 6-12 months of expenses in case of layoffs, so that is basically another downpayment, and then if layoffs happen, I might need to relocate. All of that, combined with all the other costs of owning a house (property taxes, homeowners insurance, HOAs...) make it seem like buying a house is the worst decision ever. I always envisioned myself buying a home before having kids, but I also don't want to have to wait forever to have kids.

Are any of you in this situation? I would love to hear everyone's thoughts, especially from those who successfully purchased a house and are happy with their decision.

Not including relocation assistance. Your position/level would be helpful as well. Thanks in advance!

First, big thanks for all your answers to my Benchling question before.

The last few months I’ve been diving into biotech. Reading a lot of books, trying to learn as much as I can.

One thing I’d love to know: what’s a biotech trend that’s flying under the radar?

I’m familiar with CRISPR and mRNA, but what are the hidden gems in the field right now?

Something that’s not getting much attention yet but has the potential to be huge. And why do you think it matters?

Has anyone that works at Pfizer heard that there is something big going to happen this week? Potential layoffs? Heard this recently but don’t know if true.

Boston, SF Bay Area, San Diego, Raleigh/Durham, or Seattle?

Which of these biotech hubs would you choose to live in?

Not long ago, I saw a post dissing gene therapies. It gets me thinking what is the current direction of major biotechs? I highly doubt the big pharmas would pour big money into single molecule drugs development. I think biologics is still where the job market will be. What do you all think?

If you are a researcher at a large pharmaceutical company like Johnson & Johnson or pfizer is it common to receive royalties if you create a new profitable drug or medical device that ends up going to market?

I know that the company owns the IP but do they rewards inventors of their profitable drugs with royalties or do you get paid the same base no matter what?

Just curious to see how much people in this field are typically spending on rent once in the workforce, especially since biotech jobs tend to cluster in high cost of living areas. Are you still able to follow the "30% rule"?

I know it's generally gloom and doom around here but how bad are things in 2024 actually? Any stories or pieces of data to compare things to 2023? How about the trajectory heading into 2025?

I keep seeing more layoffs so not sure if it's just been a continued bloodbath throughout.

I posted a reply to this post last week and got lots of PMs from people with Qs since then so figured it'd be better to answer them publicly so other people could benefit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/biotech/comments/1hhkzo1/how_are_most_startups_that_are_founded_by_phds/

While the tech industry has done an amazing job encouraging and teaching technical folks to found companies, biotech has made less progress and there's a lot less resources online. We started Ginkgo in 2008 and it's slightly better environment for technical founders than it was, but not a lot better unfortunately.

Recent C&E news article about the current state of things:
https://cen.acs.org/business/start-ups/Cashing-founder-led-biotech/102/i36

I'd love to see more young (or old!) technical folks jumping in to create founder-led companies in biotech -- happy to answer Qs about getting Ginkgo Bioworks going. Now is actually a good time to found something when the market for biotech is pretty rough -- we started Ginkgo in 2008 and there are benefits to that IMO.

Happy New Year ! 2025 will be a good one.

Here's my reply to the post above for ref:

"We started Ginkgo right after graduating with PhDs in bioengineering from MIT in 2008. 4 Phd students and professor - no MBA/VC experience. It was very hard to get VC funding back then straight out of PhD -- it still is hard unfortunately in biotech -- way easier in software tech. We talked to some VCs but was quickly apparent that it was pointless.

The professor (Tom Knight) put in $250K seed money and we incorporated the company and started applying for grants. You've effectively learned how to write grant proposals in your PhD so I wouldn't be afraid to go after DARPA, ARPA-E, ARPA-H grants or even SBIRs (smaller but still useful). We did this for 5 years and paid ourselves our same grad student salaries, rented the cheapest space we could find (seaport at that time in boston), and bought lab supplies and equipment off ebay or auction sites (Dovebid was my go-to back then, not sure now what is best) or got stuff for free (glassware, etc) when labs shut down at MIT. We probably brought in about $5M-$7M of grant money over that 5 year period.

At that point (2014) the tech had matured and we were getting commercial service contracts and we applied to YCombinator (we were first biotech to do YC, which we were told by everyone in bos area that it was a bad idea :P b/c what does YC know about biotech). Turns out what you really want from an accelerator like YC is that they know how to train good entrepreneurs -- it was a hugely valuable experience for us. After YC we were able to tap traditional growth/VC capital and raised $900M as a private co over the next 7 years before going public.

YC and other incubators now take biotechs more regularly and I'd recommend that path if you can get it -- but don't be afraid of just bootstrapping and applying for grants. If you are willing to be patient (and take a low salary) it can work great -- and it's as good as a postdoc anyway :) I'd love to see more new bio PhD's or even bio undergrads starting companies -- it's an untapped entrepreneur pool IMO. If you decide to do it just DM me, I'm happy to chat."

From the article:

In 2019, Deep Genomics announced it had discovered a treatment for a rare condition called Wilson disease, which is fatal if not addressed. For the afflicted, copper accumulates in their bodies, particularly in the liver, brain and cornea, where the metal can appear as a brownish ring. The Toronto-based company said in a news release that its molecule was the “first ever AI-discovered therapeutic candidate.” It wasn’t the only one Deep Genomics would divine through artificial intelligence.

Founded in 2015, the company’s AI models would go on to test more than 200 million molecules for their ability to treat disease. By 2021, Deep Genomics had zeroed in on 10 drug candidates for preclinical study and aimed to have four undergoing human trials within a couple of years.

Today, Deep Genomics has zero drugs in clinical trials and many of its plans have blown up. The company halted its Wilson disease program, ditched dozens of its machine learning models, appointed a new chief executive and is pursuing a different approach to using AI. It’s also open to a sale.

“AI has really let us all down in the last decade when it comes to drug discovery,” said Deep Genomics founder Brendan Frey. “We’ve just seen failure after failure.”

How many receive Holiday Bonuses? I was used to receiving one at a previous company (biotech consulting) but this is my first Holiday at a new biotech and I'm feeling Clark Griswold level uncertainty. Are they typical in industry?

Hey,

I've been having discussions with colleagues (I am software engineer, but work in pharma company) in the biotech industry, and a recurring topic is the challenge of managing and searching across different documents and data due to the absence of a common storage system, so I am curious:

• Is this a common problem you're facing in pharma companies, CROs, or CMOs?
• How much time and energy does it take to deal with these centralized database issues in your daily work?
• Have you found any effective solutions or workarounds to mitigate this problem?

Just have an idea of how to tackle this problem, but want to validate this

UPDATED:

I didn't mean common database between companies. I meant a centralized DB inside one company. So use cases are following
Assuming some lab in your company already ran the similar experiment 5 years ago and you are unable to find such documentexperiments results in the mess of folders, FTP, google drive, etc
Another use case is for CROs for example is a common search between experimentsdocuments data outputs of each labdepartment inside it.

Just a question I want hear answers to.

Personally I loved neuroscience in undergrad and went into the industry thinking it would fulfill. In light of all the industry issues, I’ve hesitated committing and going for my PhD in neuroscience. It’s been 2.5 years since I graduated with my bachelors.

Currently I’d like to know what made people pursue biotech… a PhD and this field in general. Was it passion? Income? What are some thoughts in hindsight and what made you guys choose this path.

A friend joined Gilead recently. Their role is based out of Foster city, CA. Job description didn't have the option for remote work. Surprisingly, they were given to the option to work remote from the East Coast. Which major companies still allow remote work? Are exceptions allowed only for few candidates?