Even as moving tariff targets and a capricious market have injected uncertainty into the operations of many biopharma players this year, it’s hard to deny the effect that President Donald Trump’s trade duties have had on industry investment in the U.S.
Collectively, major drugmakers in 2025 have announced more than $370 billion in investments in U.S. projects over the next five years, according to a new fourth-quarter market trend report from California-based contractor and construction manager DPR Construction. While DPR largely framed the investments in terms of manufacturing, many of the outlays promised cover more than production alone.
“Despite rising costs, aggressive schedules, and unpredictable market conditions, U.S. biopharmaceutical companies are proceeding with substantial investments in manufacturing,” the report states.
Thus far, many of those investments are concentrated on the East Coast, although states like Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia and Texas are also proving popular locales to host industry projects.
“While the eastern United States remains the primary investment region, emerging opportunities in the western half of the country are becoming increasingly apparent,” DPR explained in its report.
The DPR tally follows a year of seemingly unending biopharma production announcements that have largely been viewed as a reaction to the Trump administration’s tariff policies.
In late September, Trump announced via social media that, beginning Oct. 1, the U.S. would slap a 100% tariff on any “branded or patented” pharmaceutical product coming into the country unless the drug’s manufacturer was actively building a local production plant.
But, as October arrived, the rollout of the tariffs was apparently put on hold as the administration sought to give the industry time to engage on drug pricing.
In addition to those drug pricing talks, which have won several drugmakers a temporary reprieve from U.S. tariffs on their drug imports, the Trump administration has also inked country- and region-specific trade deals either capping or eliminating pharmaceutical tariffs on places like Japan, Switzerland, the EU and the U.K.
As for the companies leading the U.S. investment charge, Johnson & Johnson is at the front of the pack with a commitment of $55 billion, according to the DPR report. Roche and Genentech, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, Takeda, Eli Lilly, Novartis and Sanofi round out the other top spenders, with pledges ranging from $50 billion at the high end down to $20 billion at the low. These promised investments are typically split between R&D expenditure, M&A and partnerships, and manufacturing expansions.
On the sidelines, many smaller pharma players, biosimilar specialists and manufacturers have also taken steps to beef up their U.S. production infrastructure this year.
Recently, Moderna said it would spend $140 million to establish end-to-end mRNA production in the U.S. And it came to light last month that Regeneron is spending $2 billion of a total $7 billion U.S. investment to build out a former magazine plant in Saratoga Springs, New York, for drug production.
“These efforts are supported by recent presidential executive orders aimed at streamlining regulatory processes to promote domestic production of critical medicines, as well as initiatives to strengthen the American pharmaceutical supply chain by establishing a strategic reserve of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs),” the DPR team explained.
Back in August, the FDA announced that it was working on a new program dubbed FDA PreCheck, which broadly aims to improve early engagement between the FDA and the industry during facility build-outs, with the goal to make it easier for new manufacturing plants to come online in the U.S.
And in October, the regulator unveiled a new pilot prioritization program that aims to speed up approval review times for generic drugmakers that test and manufacture their products in the U.S.
Specifically, generics companies that file abbreviated new drug applications that meet the FDA’s domestic production and bioequivalence testing requirements—including the use of “exclusively domestic sources for API”—will become eligible for priority review, the agency explained earlier this fall.
While U.S. manufacturing operations appear to be on the upswing, domestic R&D is still facing a squeeze, according to the DPR report, which noted that two major problems continue to plague the broader R&D landscape.
Namely, current funding proposals for 2026 “are continuing a downward trend for NIH, CDC and NSF,” while “real estate oversupply and limited uptake of inventory in major U.S. R&D hubs are collectively dampening the life sciences R&D construction market,” DPR explained.
Still, some positive signs are emerging, the construction expert noted. In particular, the pace of novel drug approvals through October 2025 is beginning to align with the previous year, and a mix of new technologies like artificial intelligence—coupled with economic factors like lower interest rates and government investment incentives—are “driving optimism,” DPR said.