Pharmaceutical company Kaleo is based in The Turning Basin building in Shockoe Slip. (Jack Jacobs photo)
A locally based pharmaceutical company is planning to lay off dozens of employees, though most of the people affected are located outside of the firm’s home state.
Kaleo is cutting 58 jobs, eight of them in Virginia, according to a filing made last week to the state employment commission.
The company described the move as a “mass layoff of its sales representatives and related employees across the country,” according to the filing.
The eight Virginia-based employees, who are described as remote employees, include a vice president of human resources and a chief legal and compliance officer.
The layoffs are slated to take effect at the end of November. Kaleo said that affected employees have been given at least a 60-day notice.
A Kaleo spokeswoman declined to comment on the layoffs. Its unclear how many employees remain at the company.
Headquartered in Shockoe Slip, Kaleo invents and commercializes medical products intended to address life-threatening conditions. It developed the Aerio, a portable medication injector device, as well as AUVI-Q, an epinephrine injectable to treat allergic reactions. The company has a portfolio of about 200 patents and patent applications.
The layoffs come several months after Kaleo announced it had secured a new federal drug development contract. In April it said it had been awarded a contract worth up to $27.7 million by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to design a pralidoxime chloride injector intended to counteract the effects of nerve agent poisoning. The authority is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The contract was the third medical countermeasure contract to be awarded to Kaleo by the federal government in the last five years, according to a company news release.
In 2023, the Department of Defense tapped Kaleo to develop an atropine injector device to treat nerve agents and insecticides. Kaleo said that contract was valued at more than $39 million over a five-year period.
Kaleo was founded in 2005 by brothers Evan and Eric Edwards, the latter of whom went on to co-found Phlow Corp., a local pharma company that’s a player in an ongoing regional effort to develop a drug manufacturing hub in the Richmond-Petersburg region.
The Edwardses exited Kaleo in 2019, according to a Virginia Business report. The company, which was originally called Intelliject, was acquired by New York-based Marathon Asset Management in 2021.
Kaleo is headquartered in Richmond’s Turning Basin building at 111 Virginia St.