J&J fleshes out US investment plan, telegraphing $1B cell therapy plant and 500 new jobs in PA

With $55 billion earmarked to bolster its U.S. operations, Johnson & Johnson is the latest drugmaker to zero in on expansion plans that are aimed, at least in part, at abating the Trump administration’s pharmaceutical tariff threats. 

J&J will spend more than $1 billion to build out a next-generation cell therapy production plant in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the company said in a Feb. 18 release. Once up and running, the facility will create some 500 new permanent biomanufacturing positions, not to mention more than 4,000 construction jobs while the plant is being developed, J&J said. 

J&J did not lay out a timeline for the plant’s expected completion, nor did the company specify the types of “cutting-edge cell therapy technologies” it plans to employ at the new site. 

Still, Wednesday’s announcement adds more color to J&J’s overall $55 billion U.S. investment plan, unveiled last March, which came with a pledge to construct three new domestic manufacturing sites and expand others in the company’s existing drug and medtech network. 

The New Jersey pharma teased more details when it inked a drug pricing deal with the White House last month, clarifying that part of its investment would focus on the construction of a cell therapy plant in Pennsylvania—covered in more detail this week—as well as a new drug product manufacturing facility in North Carolina. 

J&J’s $55-billion pledge ranks on the higher end of those floated by Big Pharma last year. In a bid to get ahead of the Trump administration’s proposed import duties on drugs, many medicine makers committed to expansion projects or new facility builds in the U.S. Meanwhile, a spree of so-called “most favored nation” drug pricing deals in recent months helped reaffirm those companies’ U.S. production commitments and further solidified their immunity to tariffs. 

Apart from the new North Carolina plant announced earlier this year, J&J is also building a $2-billion, 500,000-square-foot biologics plant in the state, and, in a separate domestic manufacturing move last year, the company inked a $2-billion deal to secure long-term capacity at CDMO Fujifilm Biotechnologies’ massive new biomanufacturing campus in Holly Springs, also located in the "Tar Heel State."

On the cell therapy front, J&J currently markets the multiple myeloma CAR-T Carvykti in partnership with Legend Biotech. Originally approved in early 2022, the personalized immunotherapy hit a significant commercial milestone last year, not only crossing the blockbuster threshold for the first time, but doing so handsomely by nearly doubling its 2025 sales to $1.9 billion. 

As with other CAR-T cell therapies, Carvykti has been no stranger to supply constraints during its time on the market, with J&J and Legend working to ramp up capacity in recent years, including by doubling their investment at a cell therapy production plant in New Jersey in 2022, and enlisting Big Pharma rival Novartis as a commercial manufacturing partner on Carvykti. 

More recently, the partners last year said that they would make roughly $150 million in additional investments to expand the future capacity of a fresh cell therapy plant in Ghent, Belgium. At the time, J&J and Legend said they anticipated work on the expansion would begin in the second half of 2025, with a projected completion date set for 2028.