Naresh Jain launched NJ Biopharmaceuticals LLC this summer in a laboratory off Route 1 and promptly hired three chemists who will research new drugs for late-stage cancer patients.
If his dream goes as planned, New Jerseyans could be big winners.
“The research has gone beyond imagination,” said Jain, 53, of Flemington. “We hope one day if we continue to make progress we can find a cure for cancer.”
NJ Biopharmaceuticals has set up shop at the Commercialization Center for Innovative Technologies, 50,000-square-feet of laboratory space that is attracting entrepreneurs who are developing a new generation of drugs.
It’s part of a new push by Gov. Phil Murphy to shift gears. New Jersey, a state that has depended on big pharma for research and job growth for more than a century, is turning its attention to small pharma to provide an economic jolt.
It appears to be an acknowledgment that the state’s long-standing dependence on big drugmakers alone isn’t healthy. Much of the industry’s growth is coming from smaller firms that have been attracted to other states.
“I think the strategy makes a lot of sense,” said Debbie Hart, president and chief executive officer of BioNJ, a trade group representing both big and small companies in the biotechnology industry. “A lot of the growth is coming from new, innovative companies.”
The Commercialization Center for Innovative Technologies — CCIT for short — sits in an office park that once belonged to Johnson & Johnson.
Operated by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, the center houses 20 tenants who sign one-year leases for reasonable rent. It brings in speakers, lawyers and investors to help the scientists navigate the business world.
After five years, the entrepreneurs have to leave, either forced to admit defeat or to take the next step to bring their product to market.
One recent graduate, Amicus Therapeutics, now based in Cranbury, received FDA approval last month for a drug it developed to treat Fabry disease, a genetic disorder. It has 288 employees in the state.
Among the tenants now is Genomic Prediction, a company providing genetic testing to people with infertility. The company started a year ago and has grown to 10 employees, many of whom it recruits from nearby Rutgers University.
Its founder Nathan Treff is originally from Spokane, Washington. He spent time working in Madison, Wisconsin, and Boston, before he landed in New Jersey to take a job at an in-vitro fertilization clinic.
Treff started Genomic Prediction with two partners who were open to building the lab anywhere in the U.S. But they chose the lab space here because it offered support they needed and a line to a talented work force.
“When we thought about New Jersey, the incubator was a perfect spot,” said Treff, 41, of Bedminister.
For New Jersey’s life sciences industry, his decision is welcome news.
The state long has been considered the medicine chest of the world, home to 13 of the 20 biggest drug companies. But big pharma for nearly a decade has been retreating as its patents expired and generic competition picked up.
It downsized, consolidated and moved operations closer to researchers in other states.
New Jersey felt the sting. Scientific research and development employment in the state fell 22 percent from July 2009 to July 2017, according to U.S. Labor Departmentstatistics.
Other states advanced during that time. Massachusetts grew 39 percent, Californiagrew 15 percent, Pennsylvania grew 9 percent and New York grew 6 percent, government statistics said.
“The pharma model (for drug development) changed,” said Lenzie Harcum, CCIT’s program manager. “There were a lot of things going off patent, so they couldn’t maintain the same big, huge campus environments. They couldn’t maintain that same production. They need to change a little bit.”
“In the meantime there’s an entrepreneurial environment from the ex-pharma employees that’s growing around here,” he said. “A lot of it.”
New Jersey still has plenty of big drug companies that partner with startups to bring the final product to the market — a process that BioNJ’s Hart said can take more than $2 billion and more than 10 years.
But they have had to search externally to find the next potential blockbuster.
How to restock the medicine chest?
New Jersey has expanded the number of life science startup laboratories, known as incubators, from four to six in the past year. Johnson & Johnson, Celgene and Hackensack Meridian Health are among the private companies that have invested in them.
Murphy expanded rent assistance to biotech startups that set up shop in the incubators through a program called the Incubator and Collaborative Workspace Rent Initiative. The EDA on Wednesday invited entrepreneurs to vote on a new name to help rebrand the program.
Murphy and the Legislature approved $1 million in the recent budget to bring back the state’s New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, eight years after it was defunded. And Murphy named New York University professor Beth Noveck as the state’s first chief innovation officer. Both moves are designed to foster smaller, high-tech companies.
Big pharma’s retrenchment had a huge impact on the job market, but smaller companies could fill the gap, said Tom Sullivan, senior vice president of the life sciences group at real estate company CBRE in East Brunswick.
One sign of life: After falling steadily for eight years, scientific research and development employment in New Jersey rose 2.5 percent from July 2017 to July 2018, Labor Department statistics showed.
Can the momentum continue?
Naresh Jain thinks so.
He came to New Jersey from the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego in 1999 to take a job as a chemist at Johnson & Johnson in Bridgewater. But the corporate bureaucracy began to frustrate him.
He dipped into his savings to start The Chemistry Research Solution in 2009. It was the depth of the Great Recession, but he found affordable lab space in Bristol, Pennsylvania, and scientists who were looking for work.
