A sign with the company logo sits outside of the headquarters of Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, on March 17, 2024.
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Eli Lilly on Wednesday said it will invest at least $27 billion to build four new manufacturing sites in the U.S., as demand for its blockbuster weight loss and diabetes injections soars and the company develops new drugs for other conditions.
It comes as drugmakers and companies across different industries work to build goodwill with President Donald Trump, who has emphasized reshoring manufacturing to the U.S. and reducing reliance on foreign supply chains. Eli Lilly made the announcement at an event in Washington, D.C. — emphasizing the political undertones of the strategy.
The move brings Eli Lilly’s total U.S. manufacturing investments to more than $50 billion in recent years. The other $23 billion is from the company’s investments in new plants and site expansions since 2020, which has helped ease supply shortages of its popular drugs.
Three of the future U.S. sites announced Wednesday will manufacture active ingredients in medications, such as tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Eli Lilly’s obesity drug Zepbound and diabetes treatment Mounjaro.
The fourth site will extend the company’s global manufacturing network for future injectable therapies, according to a release.
The new investments aren’t solely dedicated to Eli Lilly’s current and future obesity and diabetes treatments. The company is charting its future beyond Zepbound and Mounjaro, with hopes to deliver drugs from its broad pipeline of products for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions.
“Lilly’s optimism about the potential of our pipeline across therapeutics areas – cardiometabolic health, oncology, immunology and neuroscience – drives our unprecedented commitment to our domestic manufacturing build-out,” Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks said in a statement Wednesday.
Still, the new investments build on the success of Zepbound and Mounjaro, which share dominance of the booming market for so-called GLP-1 drugs with Novo Nordisk‘s weight loss drug Wegovy and diabetes treatment Ozempic. Some analysts expect the global obesity drug market to be worth more than $150 billion annually by the early 2030s, making it critical for both companies to maintain their share as other drugmakers scramble to join.
Ricks added that the announcement “reflects our commitment to stay ahead of anticipated demand for safe, high-quality, [Food and Drug Administration]-approved medicines of the future.”
Eli Lilly’s efforts to boost the supply of Zepbound and Mounjaro aim to ensure that eligible patients are safely accessing those branded treatments instead of cheaper compounded versions. Patients flocked to those unapproved copycats when the branded drugs were in short supply, or if they didn’t have insurance coverage for the costly treatments.
The FDA has since declared the shortage of tirzepatide over, which will essentially bar many compounding pharmacies from making copycats.
Eli Lilly said the four new sites will create more than 3,000 jobs for workers such as engineers and scientists, along with 10,000 construction jobs as the plants are built. The company’s other U.S. plants include sites in North Carolina, Indiana and Wisconsin.
Ricks touted Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, saying that the legislation has been “foundational” to the company’s manufacturing investments. He called it “essential that these policies are extended this year.”
Key provisions from that law are set to expire at the end of December — though a reduction in the corporate tax rate will remain in effect.
That legislation, passed by a majority-Republican Congress during Trump’s first term, was the largest tax code overhaul in nearly three decades that slashed taxes for individuals and businesses. It cut the corporate tax rate to 21%, capped deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000, and expanded the child tax credit, among other efforts.
Novo Nordisk has similarly invested billions in manufacturing to ramp up supply of Wegovy and Ozempic, announcing in 2024 it would take over three sites from contract manufacturer Catalent for $11 billion.
