Seven years ago, Pfizer began cutting hundreds of research jobs from its former campus in Chesterfield as it moved much of its new drug development to the Boston area.
Instead of taking a job in Massachusetts, Joe Monahan and several of his co-workers stayed in St. Louis and started their own drug discovery and contract research firms: Confluence Life Sciences Inc. and Confluence Discovery Technologies.
Luckily, they found cheap lab space at BioGenerator, which opened shared laboratories for startups in the Cortex district around the same time pharmaceutical researchers were losing jobs by the hundreds. Monahan’s group became BioGenerator’s first tenant, and now it employs about 40 people, most of them ex-Pfizer scientists.
