After making a splash in the U.K. earlier this year, GSK is laying out plans for its biggest U.S. manufacturing investment yet.
GSK is investing up to $800 million to double the size and capacity of its production site in Marietta, Pennsylvania, the company said Thursday.
Through the addition of two new facilities, the project is set to bring on drug substance manufacturing and bolster the company's existing drug product capabilities in Marietta, the company said. The upgraded manufacturing campus will be equipped to crank out commercial drugs and vaccines plus house an R&D pilot plant to manufacture medicines for clinical trials.
GSK plans to add about 200 new employees to the Marietta team in tandem with the upgrade.
Construction on both facilities is expected to kick off by the end of the year. GSK hopes to get the drug substance plant up and running by the end of 2027, with the drug product facility expected to come online by the end of 2028.
As for the build-out of the new facilities, GSK will be keeping its carbon footprint in mind by incorporating solar panels, electric heat generation, and water and energy reclamation, the company said in its Thursday release.
The facilities will also feature contemporary tech like digital twins for continuous process optimization, robotics for material handling and more, according to the British pharma.
While GSK sets off with its largest U.S. manufacturing expansion to date, the company has made sizable production plays elsewhere since last fall. In September 2023, the company pledged more than 250 million euros ($273 million) to build a new vaccine facility at its Wavre campus in Belgium, a spokesperson said at the time.
At the time of the announcement, GSK said the facility would be operational by 2027. The site is slated to help produce freeze-dried vaccines such as the company's respiratory syncytial virus launch Arexvy and its shingles vaccine Shingrix.
And, early this year, GSK revealed more than 200 million pounds sterling (about $253 million) in investments to bolster its U.K. supply network. Those investments included a 67 million pound upgrade to GSK's manufacturing site in Montrose, Scotland, to beef up production of active pharmaceutical ingredients.