Roche has announced plans to close its plant in Nutley by the end of next year resulting in the loss of a thousand jobs. It’s the latest setback for New Jersey’s once dominant pharmaceutical industry.

42-thousand-people were employed by pharmaceutical companies in the Garden State in 1990.  That accounted for 20 percent of the jobs in that industry in the nation. Now, New Jersey has just 13 percent.

James Hughes is dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers.

 “New Jersey was the center of the universe when pharmaceutical research was based on chemistry, but the cutting edge research now is really biology based pharma, biopharma and the like.”

Hughes says companies moved their research to California and the Boston area to be near university centers specializing in life sciences.

He says the planned reorganization of New Jersey’s higher education system to boost biomedical research could help prevent the loss of even more pharmaceutical jobs.

“It may not reverse the tide completely, but I think it will make the state more competitive to keep the pharma that we have and even grow it in the future. Lacking that then I think we’re in a long-term problem area.”