Biotech workforce development programs push forward amid industry slump
- lori99905
- Sep 4, 2025
- 2 min read
by Avery Bleichfeld, The Bay State Banner
A new report from the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, or MassBio, identified an ongoing slump in the state’s life sciences industry.
The new industry snapshot, released at the end of last month, showed lower public and private funding, as well as a slight decline in hiring for biotech jobs.
Research and development jobs declined by 1.7% in 2024 and biomanufacturing jobs dropped by 1.5%; overall employment in the sector rose, but only by 0.1%.
The sector has seen increased vacancies in lab space — the new snapshot identified a vacancy rate of 22.9% in Cambridge and 38.3% in Boston — and funding has dropped.
In Massachusetts, one major source of money for the life sciences industry has been through the federal National Institutes of Health — in 2024, it had the highest NIH funding per capita — but that source has seen significant cuts. In an interview MassBio released with the snapshot, MassBio’s CEO and president Kendalle Burlin O’Connell said the state is on pace to see almost half a billion dollars of NIH cuts.
In August, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration permission to continue with cutting almost $2 billion in research grants issued by the NIH.
In 2024, private funding for the life sciences dropped too, according to the MassBio snapshot, likely in response to federal policy changes that have spurred uncertainty. Venture capital funding in the first half of 2025 was 17% lower than it was the year before.
But, while the report showed a slowdown in hiring, there isn’t a dramatic loss of jobs in the sector. The industry has seen some layoffs, while other companies have continued to grow.
In June, MassBioEd, a workforce development nonprofit, released its own workforce trends report that found a similar pattern of job numbers staying relatively steady or declining slightly.
At a national level, the life sciences industry is also experiencing lower hiring volumes. A June report from the Life Science Workforce Collaborative, a nationwide coalition of industry associations focused on workforce development, found hiring in the industry slowed down across the country in 2023, and declined slightly in 2024.
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