Eli Lilly has revealed the location of the second of its four large-scale manufacturing facilities that it plans to build in the U.S., selecting Houston as home to a $6.5 billion plant that will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients for oral drugs.
Lilly will build the newly announced plant at Generation Park in Houston. The location is not a surprise. In May, a government listing of state incentive applications detailed Lilly’s interest in purchasing 236 acres on the massive campus, which is 20 minutes northeast of downtown Houston.
The company plans to house 615 employees at the plant, with roles for engineers, scientists, lab technicians and operations personnel. Lilly also expects the project will generate 4,000 construction jobs.
Lilly is working to bolster its domestic manufacturing capacity and strengthen its supply chain. The huge outlay reflects an industry trend in which drugmakers are pouring investments into the U.S. in response to the growing threat of tariffs on pharmaceutical goods imported from foreign countries.
The facility will focus on manufacturing Lilly’s small molecule medicines to treat cardiometabolic, oncology, immunology and neuroscience disorders. Production of the oral GLP-1 drug orforglipron, which Lilly plans to submit for approval in obesity treatment later this year, is also expected at the plant.
“This significant U.S. investment and onshoring of our API production capabilities will ensure faster, more secure access to orforglipron and to other life-changing medicines of the future,” Lilly CEO David Ricks said in a Sept. 23 release.
As it applies to oral GLP-1 drugs, Lilly is preparing to compete with a familiar foe, Novo Nordisk, which is producing its pill version of obesity drug Wegovy end-to-end at its facilities in North Carolina.
With its setup there, Novo can "run in a U.S.-to-U.S. supply chain," Dave Moore, the company's U.S. operations chief, said last week in a release which revealed successful phase 3 results for the treatment.
The Houston project follows another plan Lilly unveiled a week ago of a $5 billion API facility near Richmond, Virginia.
Lilly describes the Virginia plant as its first “dedicated, fully integrated” API and drug product facility for the company’s bioconjugate platform and monoclonal antibody portfolio. Among the products it will manufacture will be antibody-drug conjugates.
The facilities are part of a $27 billion investment plan the Indianapolis drugmaker laid out seven months ago during a high-profile press event in Washington, D.C.
Each of the new facilities, which Lilly calls “mega sites,” are expected to be completed in the next five years. In February, the company said three of the four plants would be for API production while the other site will manufacture injected drugs. The company expects to name the other two sites by the end of this year.
In addition to the economic incentives, Lilly chose Houston from more than 300 applications because of the “workforce potential” in the area along with its “access to utilities and transportation and favorable business environment,” Lilly said.
Other biopharma companies that have revealed massive investment plans in the U.S. in recent months include AstraZeneca and Roche, which have pledged to spend $50 billion each, and Johnson & Johnson, which has unveiled a $55 billion plan covering both its pharmaceuticals and medtech businesses.
Meanwhile, Sanofi and Novartis have committed to spend at least $20 billion each to bolster their facilities in the U.S. by the end of the decade.