Eli Lilly is further boosting manufacturing in its home state of Indiana.
The company said it is allocating an additional $5.3 billion into its budget to build an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) production facility for its blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs.
This new investment is more than double Lilly’s earlier $3.7 billion commitment to the Lebanon, IN, site. With the funding boost, the build will now cost $9 billion and add 200 jobs for engineers, scientists, operating and laboratory technicians, for a new total of 900 employees, according to a Friday release.
“Today’s announcement tops the largest manufacturing investment in our company’s history and, we believe, represents the single largest investment in synthetic medicine API manufacturing in US history,” according to CEO David Ricks in a statement.
Lilly’s billion-dollar manufacturing site within the LEAP Research and Innovation District will also “support pipeline growth and leverage the latest technology and automation,” the company said.
The drugmaker expects to start manufacturing there at the end of 2026, with operations to ramp up through to 2028. The state of Indiana said it will contribute land to Lilly for a new training center and will help make road, water, electric and other improvements for the pharma’s manufacturing campus.
With diabetes drug Mounjaro and weight loss drug Zepbound in shortage, Lilly has been working on increasing its manufacturing capacity.
According to Lilly, it has earmarked over $16 billion in new manufacturing sites since 2020. Outside of Indiana, it has new builds in Ireland, Germany and two in North Carolina.
It also allocated $1.2 billion to upgrade its existing sites in Indianapolis. And in April, the pharma company snapped up a sterile injectable manufacturing site from Nexus Pharma in Wisconsin.
Lilly’s rival, Novo Nordisk, is similarly boosting production capacity for its diabetes and weight loss drugs. In February, Novo Holdings announced its yet-to-be-finalized $16.5 billion acquisition of Catalent, and Novo Nordisk plans to take in three of Catalent’s fill-finish sites. Novo Nordisk previously said it would only outsource fill-finish of its own blockbuster GLP-1 drugs, as it will keep API production in-house.