56 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
ing the anxiety treatment Valium and the
melanoma drug Zelboraf—until the com-
pany decided to move its US headquarters
to San Francisco as part of its takeover of
Genentech. In 2012, Hoffmann-La Roche
announced the closure of its New Jer-
sey site, and four years later, New Jersey-
based real estate developer Prism Capital
Partners bought the campus for a reported
$88.5 million, according to real estate news
outlet The Real Deal , after noticing the pro-
liferation of smaller and mid-size biotech
companies in the state. “We saw the R&D
money flowing back in and recognized that
there’d be opportunity,” says Prism Capital
Partners founder, Eugene Diaz.
It didn’t take the agency long to find
tenants from various fields of life science
to occupy parts of the campus, Diaz says.
The Hackensack Meridian Health Sys-
tem is creating a health sciences–focused
research campus there, and recently fin-
ished redeveloping an existing building
into what is now the Hackensack Meridian
School of Medicine. The former pharma
complex, named On3 after the connect-
ing state highway Route 3, will also houseseveral of Seton Hall University’s graduate
health sciences programs, plus a number
of other life science facilities with focuses
ranging from manufacturing biomaterials
to developing diagnostic tools for disease.
Other real estate companies or devel-
opers are attempting to reposition former
pharmaceutical sites as biotech incubator
spaces with the potential to fuel the next
generation of biologics-based therapeutics.
For instance, The Discovery Labs, a com-
pany launched by real estate investor MLP
Ventures, is currently redeveloping a former
GlaxoSmithKline campus in the Pennsyl-
vania township of Upper Merion. When it
sold the property in 2018 to MLP Ventures,
GlaxoSmithKline decided to lease one build-
ing as a cleanroom for developing one of its
therapeutics. The rest will be taken up by a
range of life science–focused tenants, includ-
ing the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
and laboratory materials supplier Tosoh Bio-
science. Unite IQ, The Discovery Labs’s own
biotech incubator, is to form the heart of the
site, explains Audrey Greenberg, the compa-
ny’s cofounder and managing director.
Greenberg envisions the repopulated
campus as a collaborative workspace that
could help accelerate the development of
new therapeutics by building a community
of tenants, each of which specializes in a dif-
ferent aspect of the drug development pipe-
line. “Whether it be getting a viral vector,getting a plasmid, getting [contract manu-
facturing organizations] to work with them
on research development and outsourcing...
intellectual property attorneys,” says Green-
berg—“[they’re] all housed under one roof.”
Such transitions don’t come without
challenges. For instance, in several build-
ings on Hoffmann-La Roche’s former
campus in New Jersey, each floor had a
3:1 ratio of lab to office space—considered
a good split when the property was built
during the 20th century. However, today’s
companies prefer a 1:1 allocation to allow
more space for the computational equip-
ment and personnel involved in research,
Diaz says. Because the buildings had been
built with unmovable block walls, they
couldn’t be adapted to a new ratio—one
of the reasons why Roche and Prism even-
tually had them torn down.
Some of Wiederseim’s clients also need
tweaks to the laboratories to make them
suitable for biologics-based research. For
instance, fume hoods, designed to protect
researchers working with potent reagents
and chemicals, may need replacing with
biosafety cabinets, which protect the integ-
rity of the biological entity, such as cells
or DNA. These challenges are often sur-
mountable, however, and Diaz notes that
several vacant pharmaceutical sites in the
US have now successfully been redeveloped
into life-science parks.Leaving pharma
For sites that fail to find a purpose in new
scientific projects, the future is far less cer-
tain. Facilities that are old or in less attrac-
tive locations can remain empty for years,
Gordon says. Some are simply torn down
altogether. For instance, after Schering-
Plough closed its R&D facility in Bloom-
field, New Jersey, in the 1990s, “no other
company (large or small) wanted it,” sci-
ence journalist Derek Lowe wrote in a
2014 blog post in Science. Eventually, the
buildings were razed and the land sold.
Since 1997, a Home Depot store has stood
in its place.
Others get demolished “because
they’re contaminated and they’re hard
to repurpose,” says Wiederseim, who
says he and his colleagues have recom-KITCHEN FITTING: Many of Pfi zer’s old labora-
tories at 630 Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn, some
of which boast a view of Manhattan’s skyline,
have been converted into workspaces for local
food manufacturers.KATARINA ZIMMER