Even as the uncertainty of U.S. tariff policy drives multibillion-dollar manufacturing pledges in the U.S., Ireland remains well positioned as an investment hotspot for global biopharma more broadly, and the country hopes to share some lessons from that success when it takes a prominent position in European Union politics later this year.
That’s according to Rory Mullen, head of biopharma and food at IDA Ireland, the country’s foreign direct investment agency, who recently sat down with Fierce to discuss the evolution of the country’s life sciences business landscape, as well as where things stand today amid a tumultuous global trade environment.
Under a U.S.-EU trade deal put forward last summer, European imports into the U.S.—including branded pharmaceuticals—would have been subject to a 15% tariff cap. But the integrity of the deal was suddenly thrown into question after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs late last month.
Trump pledged to impose new taxes on trading partners in turn, prompting EU officials to pause its ratification of the deal. But in a boon for drugmakers, pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients are exempt from the new “temporary import duty” proposed by the U.S. president.
Mullen admitted that there is little clarity around the tariff situation for Ireland and Europe more broadly, but he stressed that pharmaceuticals have more or less been spared in Trump’s trade policy campaign.
The IDA representative speculated that Trump’s primary aim around pharmaceuticals is to lower costs in the U.S. through his “most favored nation” drug pricing framework, which broadly seeks to rebalance American drug prices according to the lowest price paid in other developed nations and has leveraged tariff threats as an enforcement tool. Mullen noted that the industry has faced less pressure from the “stick” of the U.S. president’s tariff threats than others.
And although the Trump administration's trade posture has yielded highly public U.S. investments, that won’t quell the need for new projects in other countries, Mullen figures. Plus, a mounting sense of geopolitical ambiguity might further cement bigger companies’ desire to diversify and regionalize their supply chains, Mullen suggested.
“There’s so much geopolitical uncertainty between China, Europe and the U.S.,” he said. “I think that’s what’s driven the biopharma companies—the large ones—to look at having regional supply chain strategies to try and ensure that geographic resilience.”
“If they’re large enough, and they need that volume of capacity, they put something in the U.S. and something in Europe and something in Asia,” he continued.
The recent emphasis on American capacity hasn’t disrupted other manufacturing outlays in Ireland, at least for now, he reiterated.
“There is a very long timeline on manufacturing decisions,” Mullen explained, “So, we haven’t seen anybody change any decisions that they’ve made to build up capacity in Ireland.”
Still, he admitted that companies now seem to be “seeking more certainty before they make new decisions.”
The Irish biopharma investment scene
Ireland, as a country, was late to industrialize and has relied on foreign investment as it has built itself up in recent decades, said Mullen, noting that IDA began its work attracting foreign investments in the 1960s.
As Ireland has become an increasingly attractive destination for foreign outlays, the country has excelled in the life sciences specifically, with the local industry now relatively evenly split between medtech and biopharma, Mullen said.
All told, those fields today employ more than 100,000 people in the country, said Mullen, adding that “all of the major U.S. innovative pharma companies have operations in Ireland.” That is also true for many European drugmakers and increasingly so for Asian pharmas as well, he pointed out.
After Ireland attracted a small molecule manufacturing operation from Pfizer—which kicked off production in 1971 in Ringaskiddy—Ireland took steps around the turn of the 21st century to ensure it remained competitive in biologics as well, establishing the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT), which opened a facility in Dublin in 2011.
In a sign of the country’s continuing attractiveness to manufacturers, Novo Nordisk this week unveiled a 432 million euro ($500 million) expansion at its Irish facility in Athlone, which it acquired in 2023 and where it now plans to add a new tableting plant for its Wegovy pill for obesity, plus other oral GLP-1s.
Novo’s CEO, Mike Doustdar, indicated earlier this year that his company was eyeing Ireland as a Wegovy pill supply hub for markets outside the U.S., where the oral obesity med was approved late last year and launched in January.
Other recent projects from foreign firms include a 150 million euro ($177 million) filtration products plant in Cork, which is being built by Merck KGaA’s MilliporeSigma unit as part of a broader 440 million euro Ireland investment announced in 2022.
Mullen highlighted Ireland’s “very business-friendly environment” and favorable tax dynamics as reasons for its attractiveness to biopharma investors, alongside the talent development the country has invested in through organizations like NIBRT.
“You need to be able to know that you are going to have the design and the construction expertise to be able to build those plants on time and within budget, and you need to know that you’re going to be able to recruit the staff, from the engineering and analytics staff through to the operators on the floor,” Mullen said of the motivation to build in Ireland.
Meanwhile, Mullen echoed Ireland’s misgivings around reforms to EU pharmaceutical legislation proposed late last year, which were shared by other European nations with prominent pharma bases such as Denmark, Germany and France. Aside from measures meant to strengthen domestic supply chains, the pharma package also sought to improve the overall competitiveness of the bloc.
Changes that would have broadly shortened intellectual property protections on biopharma products were a major sticking point for critics of the package, and Mullen noted that the controversial exclusivity proposal has since been dropped.
Meanwhile, Ireland may soon be able to leverage some of its industry know-how in a big way, with the country slated to take over the presidency of the Council of the European Union in July, Mullen pointed out.
During Ireland’s upcoming six-month tenure, “our focus is on improving competitiveness within Europe and reducing bureaucracy,” Mullen said, admitting that “a lot of people would feel that the EU institutions can be quite cumbersome.”