THE MEDICINE CHEST
New Jersey has also been hit with losses in its key pharmaceutical industry as more companies elected to move into urban environments, rather than suburban locales that attracted young families to the state in the 1980s.
Swiss drugmaker Roche had its U.S. base in Nutley for more than 80 years before a 2009 merger with Genentech that moved the combined headquarters to San Francisco. It shuttered the Nutley campus in 2012, costing New Jersey about 1,000 jobs.
Roche planned a clinical research center on the U.S. East Coast with 240 people, but picked a Manhattan site created by Alexandria Real Estate Equities, which creates urban campuses for pharmaceutical, technology and biotech companies.
The New York site gives young people the lifestyle not available in suburbia. It also put Roche in close contact with other companies, hospitals and universities for quicker collaborations for drug development.
“They (New Jersey) were the leaders in this country, but they didn’t recognize the fundamental change in the industry, the expiration of patents of big pharma and the nature of collaborations and innovations,” Joel Marcus, Alexandria’s founder, chief executive and chairman, told Reuters.
Between 2008 and 2013, New Jersey, long considered the “medicine chest of the world,” saw pharmaceutical jobs decline by 17 percent, according to state data. Nationally, the industry also shrank, though not as much.
Last Friday, Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that it would open a new research site at Alexandria’s center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pulling with it employees from Connecticut and some from New Jersey.