54 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
BIO BUSINESST
he hallways of Pfizer’s first-ever
facility once swarmed with more
than 1,000 workers tasked with
making some of the most popular drugs
of our time, including the erectile dys-
function treatment Viagra and the anti-
biotic Zithromax. Nowadays, the building
in Brooklyn, New York, carries scents of
chocolate, baked goods, beer, and a linger-
ing waft of construction.
Pfizer began to wind down its produc-
tion of drugs here decades ago, and the last
of the company’s Brooklyn employees had
to leave in 2008 when the pharmaceuti-
cal giant closed down the site as part of
a wave of modernizing changes. But Pfiz-
er’s birthplace has since become a much
sought-after space in one of Brooklyn’s
most cramped neighborhoods, with about
1,600 people now working in the building.
The eighth floor, which used to be
reserved for the offices of Pfizer’s chiefexecutives, now hosts counterterrorism
training run by New York City’s Police
Department for its officers. A vast space
on the fifth floor, where half a dozen
nine-foot-tall stainless steel mixers used
to churn pulp that would be pressed
into a variety of pills, spent much of
the summer filled with construction
debris—a result of the area’s transfor-
mation into a soundproof recording stu-
dio for the Blue Man Group. Many of
the building’s old research labs are now
used by local artisans to make a variety
of food products, and in a spacious tent
in the parking lot, acrobats train on a
40-foot structure built by the Trapeze
School of New York.
“ Yo u can see how this [transformation]
is adapting, reusing space, that was used
by Pfizer fi f ty, sixty years ago,” explains Jeff
Rosenblum of Acumen Capital Partners, a
real estate firm specializing in repurpos-ing industrial buildings, which bought the
property in 2011 for $26 million. Still the
building’s owner, the company now has an
office there on the sixth floor.
The Pfizer site is not the only pharma-
ceutical facility to get a makeover in recent
years. Dozens of giant drug-manufacturing
and research facilities in the US and else-
where have been abandoned by their parent
companies. Some continue their stories
in other realms of life science, some sit
empty and unused, while others—like
Pfizer’s old facility—find new purpose in
entirely different industries.Changes in the way Big Pharma operates are leaving dozens of research
and manufacturing facilities empty. What happens to them?BY KATARINA ZIMMERPharma’s Orphans
A NEW LOOK: An old GlaxoSmithKline cam-
pus in Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania
(photograph, opposite), is currently being
transformed into what its developers, The
Discovery Labs, call “the largest ‘coworking’
ecosystem for healthcare, life sciences and
technology-enabled companies in the country”
(artist’s rendition, above).THE DISCOVERY LABS