Europe’s largest pharmaceutical company, which currently employs 16,000 people in the UK, has come into fire recently when they announced restructuring plans that would result in 100’s of research and development jobs within the UK coming to an end.

The reason for this is partly due to the fact that there are no new plans to develop depression and pain medicines, something of a sore point at the moment for Glaxo. Which has had to pay £63 million in out of court lawsuits relating to a specific antidepressant drug they make called Paxil, the drug was actually linked to an increase of risk of suicide.

Within all this bad news, the `Patent Box` could be the answer. This was introduced by the government in the 2009 budget. The `Patent Box` basically states that if you are a company based on innovation activities and obtains patents in the UK, then corporation tax will be reduced to 10%.

This is of course excellent news for Glaxo, which obviously patents all there drugs. On the back of this news, recruitment agencies will be pleased to know that jobs will be now created for a new biopharmaceutical factory in Greenfield manufacturing centre. This could be at least 600 in this sector and 400 elsewhere within the company.

Andrew Witty, chief executive, stated we are doing this project as a direct result of the government’s commitment, by creating the `Patent Box`.

Glaxo will use pharmaceutical recruitment agencies to find many of these candidates and so is definitely good news for the agencies that operate in this sector.