If I were New Jersey, I'd be worried, and not just for the usual reasons. It's no longer the necessary place to go for a job in the drug industry. Novartis, which has been in the state forever, declined to expand in Switzerland but also passed on New Jersey, choosing the Boston area (Cambridge) instead. For the last year or two, they've been the major hiring force in the entire pharmaceutical industry - and it's a good thing, too, because there have been some losses at other companies in that time.

The Boston/Cambridge area has been pretty hot the last few years. AstraZeneca's main US research site is there, too, supplanting the old Astra sites in New York state and the Zeneca site in Wilmington. Merck decided to expand there, too, although with their recent troubles it's anyone's guess what's going to happen to the site and the people they're hiring. Their official opening was one week after the Vioxx news broke, which must have toned the celebration down a tad.

On the West coast, it's the San Diego area that's getting all the big names. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson have both expanded out there, and there are plenty of small outfits springing up. It's like Cambridge with better weather, not that that's a very demanding criterion.

So where does that leave the good ol' Pharma Corridor, from Philadelphia to New York? Used to be, you could hit most of the big guys with a rock from the New Jersey Turnpike (or perhaps the Garden State Parkway, which was literally within a flung Erlenmeyer from the windows of the first industrial lab I ever worked in.) I don't know when the last major expansion in the area was - probably ten years ago. And there's some food for thought for the fish-nor-fowl Connecticut branch of the industry, too (Boehringer Ingleheim, Bayer, BMS-Wallingford, Pfizer's mothership). Some of those companies have expanded over the last ten years (Pfizer, most notably), but no new behemoths are moving in.

And it's too early to say if these new sites are going to do what they're supposed to: crank out lots of new discoveries. The whole point of moving to La Jolla or Cambridge is to tap into the wild, creative crowd that's supposed to inhabit these places. Can they deliver, or will it be time to be off to Little Rock, Albuquerque, or whatever the happening cities are twenty years from now?