Nxera Pharma plans to lay off 15% of its staff and reprioritize its pipeline as part of a push to clear its path to profitability.
The company, which was previously called Sosei, has grown through acquisitions over the past decade, buying the U.K.’s Heptares Therapeutics to add drug discovery capabilities and Idorsia Pharmaceuticals' Japanese business to secure commercial products. Nxera is harnessing the assets to pursue its sales and profitability targets for 2030.
Chasing those targets, the company has decided to streamline its leadership team—eliminating three of the current 10 posts by March 2026—and lay off 15% of its workforce. The workforce cuts encompass roles in the U.K. and Japan. Nxera said the layoffs won't impact operations in Switzerland or South Korea.
The U.K. and Japan are home to most of Nxera’s workforce, which totaled (PDF) 384 employees at the end of September. Nxera last disclosed the geographic split of the workforce in its 2023 annual report. At that time, Nxera employed 173 people at the Heptares’ offices in the U.K. A further 89 people worked at the former Idorsia site in Japan, and 30 employees were based at Nxera’s head office in Tokyo.
Nxera CEO Chris Cargill said at a Jefferies conference Monday that about 170 scientists work at the U.K. office, which handles all the company’s discovery and early clinical work. The company plans to reduce its cash R&D spending by around 3.5 billion yen ($22.6 million) at its U.K. site in its 2026 financial year.
The biotech has rethought how it will spend its R&D budget. Under the new plan, Nxera is focused on next-generation therapies for obesity, metabolic and endocrine disorders. Equipped with Heptares’ GPCR drug discovery capabilities, Nxera plans to invest in best-in-class opportunities where the target biology is best understood and de-risked.
Nxera is pulling back from an EP4 agonist program in inflammatory bowel disease as part of the refocusing. Cargill said the program has gone “extremely well.” Yet the level of competition in a setting that Cargill said is a “very, very complex and expensive area to be developing an asset” has driven the company to rethink its plans.
“We're probably not the best company to be advancing this program further ourselves,” Cargill said. “What we are looking to do is round out the phase 1 package very shortly. In time for a major healthcare conference in January, we will be ready to talk to potential partners about how we move forward with this program. We're not going to put any further capital into this program.”