Roughly half a year after breaking ground on the project, Roche is significantly upscaling its investment in a new production plant slated to come online in North Carolina’s biopharma hotbed.
Roche is more than doubling its total commitment to the future facility for its Genentech unit to approximately $2 billion, the Swiss drugmaker said in a Jan. 20 press release. The Genentech plant, being built in Holly Springs, North Carolina, was backed by a more than $700 million investment at the time of its announcement last May.
With the supercharged outlay, Genentech will build out additional manufacturing capacity at the site and substantially increase the facility’s output. The plant is expected to come online by 2029 and will produce next-generation treatments for metabolic conditions such as obesity, the company said Tuesday.
The Holly Springs site, which will also mark Genentech’s first East Coast production facility in the U.S., is being designed to leverage advanced biomanufacturing approaches, as well as automation and digital tools, according to the release.
Thanks to the project’s expansion, Roche also plans to hire an additional 100 new employees to the site, which is expected to boast more than 500 manufacturing jobs once fully up and running.
The Holly Springs facility forms part of the overall $50 billion U.S. pledge that Roche announced last April. Roche is one of a spate of large drugmakers that have sought to evade the Trump administration’s pharmaceutical tariffs through domestic manufacturing and investment promises.
Meanwhile, Genentech in December also signed a “most favored nation” drug-pricing agreement with the White House, which is expected to confer tariff exemptions in exchange for implementing price cuts and opening new sales channels for certain Genentech meds.
When announcing the Holly Springs site last year, Roche and Genentech noted that the facility would primarily tackle fill-and-finish work for next-generation obesity drugs. At the time, Roche said it could increase its investment based on business needs and “the U.S. policy environment.”
Genentech officially broke ground on the new plant in August.
Despite a mix of manufacturing pledges and “most favored nation” deals last year, new geopolitical concerns could cast the global trade environment into turmoil once again.
Namely, Trump’s new threat to impose 10% tariffs on select European allies in relation to his Greenland aspirations could upend a U.S.-European Union trade deal inked last summer, Politico reported over the weekend.
While the effect of a new trade war could be more muted for the pharmaceutical industry, thanks to exemptions won through U.S. drug pricing deals, “even limited tariffs add compliance complexity and planning uncertainty,” analytics firm GlobalData wrote in a recent release on the situation.