Abandoned Pharma

It's not the most cheerful topic in the world, but NPR recently had an item on the decommissioned pharma research sites of New Jersey (of which there are many). Some of these are quite large, and correspondingly hard to unload onto anyone else. (This is, of course, a problem that is not unique to New Jersey, with plenty of ex-pharma sites around the US and the UK in particular falling into this category). I got to see this in an earlier and less severe form when I worked at Schering-Plough: the company's old Bloomfield site proved difficult to deal with in the early 1990s once everyone had moved out of it. No other company (large or small) wanted it, and I was told that an attempt to more or less donate it to Rutgers University had fallen through as well. In the end, the buildings were demolished and the land was sold, with a Home Depot (and its parking lot) taking up a good part of the space. That's always one option. Another is what happened to my next stop in pharma, the Bayer campus at West Haven. Yale picked that one up for what we heard was a good price, and turned it into the Yale West Research Campus. So that at least keeps the place doing research, which has to beat turning it into a hardware store. Breaking things up into an incubator for smaller companies is a good plan, too, when it can be done.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Industry History Source Type: blogs