Less than one month after parent company Terumo Medical Corporation sold the DuraHeart II system to Thoratec Corporation for $13 million in cash, subsidiary Terumo Heart has laid off more than 65 employees at its headquarters in Scio Township.
Terumo Heart, which had approximately 166 employees before the sale of the technology to Thoratec, had completed a $3.6 million expansion of the company’s offices and manufacturing space in 2009.
The headquarters for Terumo Heart and Terumo Cardiovascular Systems are on the same campus in Scio Township.
File photo | AnnArbor.com
WARN notices are required by law in the occasion of a plant closing or mass layoff of more than 50 employees. According to the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and the Budget’s website, there were 20 WARN notices submitted to the state between Jan. 1 and June 30 of this year. The only previous WARN notice from Ann Arbor in 2013 was for the closing of the Pall Life Sciences Corporation.
After the layoffs and exits, approximately 60 employees remain at Terumo Heart to continue supporting existing customers of the company’s first DuraHeart model.
“The short-term immediate focus for the company is to continue to support the patients already on DuraHeart technology,” Murphy said.
“They will be relaunching the product in Japan shortly, so all of the patients that have a DuraHeart will continue to be supported by Terumo Heart. It’s unclear at this time whether they will also continue research and development of new products.”
Terumo Cardiovascular Systems, the larger Terumo subsidiary in Ann Arbor, employs approximately 600 people in Scio Township and was unaffected by the layoffs. Murphy said that the larger company is looking to hire in some of the employees who were let go by Terumo Heart.
“There are 10 or so of the Terumo Heart employees who are actively engaged in trying to stay within the Terumo family,” he said.
“That could mean at Terumo CVS here or at another Terumo facility in the U.S.”
Murphy said that all laid off employees were given an “impressive separation package” that included a severance pay and an outplacement package with “full benefits.”
The DuraHeart technology developed by Terumo is a Left Ventricle Assist System, a small pump implanted into a patient's body designed to assist blood flow in the heart. According to the company's website, Terumo Heart was created as a subsidiary specifically to finish development the DuraHeart technology and bring it to market.
Terumo Heart and Terumo CVS are both part of Terumo Medical Corporation, a worldwide health products conglomerate that employs more than 12,000 people and has developed more than 1,200 products.
Ben Freed covers business for AnnArbor.com. You can sign up here to receive Business Review updates every week. Get in touch with Ben at 734-623-2528 or email him at benfreed@annarbor.com. Follow him on twitter @BFreedinA2