Following its decision to stop promoting the heart drug Zontivity, Merck has announced that it is cutting 148 jobs at its North Wales campus, writes John George for the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The cuts, which are effective Sept. 12th, come just a month after Merck announced it was moving more than 300 positions from Pennsylvania and New Jersey to its facilities in Boston and San Francisco.

According to Merck spokesperson Lainie Keller, this latest downsizing is a result of the company’s decision to stop promoting its heart medication Zontivity. She noted that these cuts are completely separate from the earlier shift of employees working in the discovery, pre-clinical, and early-development areas of its laboratories division.

According to Keller, those changes were made to increase its investment in exploratory biomedical research to enable earlier access to emerging science and technology. That work is focused at its Cambridge, Mass., and San Francisco Bay area facilities, which facilitated the need for the workers to move.

The affected jobs in this round of cuts are at the company’s North Wales site only. Merck, which is based in Kenilworth, N.J., will continue to employ more than 12,000 workers in Montgomery County, most at its West Point campus in Upper Gwynedd Township

Read more about the job cuts at Merck in the Philadelphia Business Journal by clicking here.