Roche has chosen a life science park on the east side of Manhattan, New York as the location for its new Translational Clinical Research Center (TCRC), part of a restructuring and streamlining programme in the Swiss company’s Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) group.
Announced last June, the pRED overhaul included the decision to close Roche’s 80 year-old US research and development site in Nutley, New Jersey, with the loss of some 1,000 jobs.
The company plans to transfer around 200 staff from pRED and Product Development in Nutley to the Alexandria Center for Life Science in New York City’s so-called East Side Medical Corridor.
It has also committed to retaining some 50 management-level positions in “a Northern New Jersey location”, which reflects the “extremely compelling case” made by the State of New Jersey for locating the TCRC at the unified Rutgers and Robert Wood Johnson complex in New Brunswick.
Critical presence
Roche has taken out an 11-year lease on a property at the Alexandria Center and expects to move staff there at the end of 2013, once the Center’s West Tower is completed. The roughly 421,000 sq ft West Tower is the second phase of development at the Alexandria Center for Life Science and should be finished in the fourth quarter of 2013.
The TCRC will be the “critical early-development presence” for Roche pRED in the US, its parent said. The Clinical Research Center will take projects from discovery in Europe through the Lifecycle Investment Point, where molecules transition from early- to late-stage development.
TCRC staff will be responsible for leading global early-development programmes and clinical trials, as well as for strategy development and translational research programmes focused on disease understanding and moving forward potential new medicines.
Collaborative hub
The Translational Clinical Research Center is designed to build on and enhance links to Roche’s US stakeholders, maintain interactions with the Food and Drug Administration, and enhance collaborations with US-based partners.
According to Alexandria Real Estate Equities, which developed the Alexandria Center for Life Science in partnership with the City and State of New York, the location will “provide Roche with critical adjacency to New York City’s nine major academic medical centres and its numerous ongoing clinical trials in a thriving environment purposely built for life-science collaboration and innovation”.
