New Jersey was once so chock-full of thriving pharmaceutical companies that it was known as America’s medicine chest. But that dominance eroded as one major drug company after another abandoned corporate campuses that had provided thousands of high-paying jobs. The exodus has left officials in the state scrambling to find ways to fill the voids. Hotels? Condos? Yet another shopping mall? Instead of going down any of those predictable paths, officials in the North Jersey communities of Nutley and Clifton are pinning their hopes on something completely different: the state’s first private medical school in more than 60 years. The school, a joint venture of Seton Hall University and Hackensack University Health Network, would be the anchor tenant of a 119-acre site that for decades had been occupied by Hoffman-La Roche, a pioneering pharmaceutical company now known as Roche. In 2012, the company, which employed 5,000 people in 40 buildings on the campus as recently as 2009, announced it would shutter the site and shift the remaining workers elsewhere.

December 9, 2015 ・ From The New York Times