At a time when so many pharma employees are looking for new jobs or worry about being laid off, most of Millenium Pharmaceutical’s 1,000 workers have a different problem - whether to accept retention bonuses Takeda Pharmaceuticals plans to offer to convince them to stay at least 12 to 24 months after its $8.8 billion acquisition is completed this spring.

The details aren’t being revealed yet, but the move seems to have surprised just about everyone. “It’s highly unusual,” Anna Protopapas, Millenium’s senior executive vice president at Millennium, tells The Boston Herald. Bob Coughlin, chief executive of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, calls the bonus “extraordinary,” and the incentive is designed to calm anxious Millennium employees who may be upset at the prospect of a new owner.

No layoffs are expected at Millennium - and the current management team, including ceo Deborah Dunsire, is expected to keep running the firm under the Millennium name, the companies said yesterday.

“Contrast that to, say, Pfizer’s purchase of Sugen, or Lilly’s purchase of ICOS, or J&J’s purchase of Scios,” Derek Lowe writes at In The Pipeline. “In those cases, the larger companies were in it to buy a drug (or a few possible drugs), and that was that. Medicinal chemists? Pharmacologists? Those they already had. What they needed were the clinical candidates or marketed compounds. The folks in the small-company labs quickly found themselves getting those “What, are you still here?”. And pretty soon, most of them weren’t, voluntarily or involuntarily.”