After blueprinting an injectables facility in North Carolina in 2020, it didn’t take long for Eli Lilly to draw up designs for a second in the Tar Heel State.
Following declines in the manufacturing, textiles and tobacco industries that once formed the core trades in the state, North Carolina has increasingly put its chips behind biotechnology. It's a strategy that has attracted not only Lilly but myriad other pharma majors like Fujifilm Biotechnologies, Johnson & Johnson and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
For Lilly, building a new parenteral products and devices facility in the city of Concord was a natural evolution following the decision to throw down $470 million on a similar injectables plant at North Carolina’s famed Research Triangle Park back in 2020.
At the time of the Concord project’s reveal, Lilly said it had selected the site thanks to the area’s existing manufacturing labor force plus the city’s proximity to universities with strong programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The company also highlighted the benefits of nearby transportation infrastructure, which is beneficial to the largely local workforce Lilly has amassed at the Concord site.
Together, Lilly’s two North Carolina facilities—which are used in part to make incretin medicines such as Zepbound and Mounjaro—are part of the drugmaker’s ongoing, multibillion-dollar investment in U.S. infrastructure. They also form part of a bulwark against the immense demand for Lilly’s dual GIP/GLP-1 products for diabetes and obesity.
After announcing the project in 2022, Lilly cut the ribbon at its Concord plant last June and began shipping medicines to patients before the end of the year, Rosa Manso, the site head in Concord, said during a recent facility tour attended by Fierce Pharma.
As it stands, the plant is helping produce products from Lilly’s commercial portfolio and is equipped to handle manufacturing on future meds from Lilly’s pipeline, too, Manso said.
The site itself is spread across some 400 acres that previously hosted a prominent Philip Morris plant. Lilly’s plant, meanwhile, occupies just over 1 million square feet and features two main buildings for manufacturing: one for producing injectable products and another for device assembly and packaging.
Earlier this month, Fierce Pharma was able to tour the device assembly facility, which leverages a mix of high-speed lines, automation and robotics to assemble prefilled syringes into autoinjectors. The site also employs automated guided vehicles—not dissimilar in design to a forklift crossed with one of the Daleks of Dr. Who fame—which ferry materials through the facility along preset paths.
“At one of our most recent sites using this technology in North Carolina, we are capable of doubling production compared to our other facilities,” Lilly says of its use of manufacturing robotics and automation on its website.
Aside from the production buildings themselves, Lilly’s Concord site also features a fully automated warehouse, Manso added.
Back when Lilly first unveiled its designs on the Concord facility, the company said it would invest $1 billion in the project and create about 600 new jobs for scientists, engineers and manufacturing personnel.
Since then, Lilly has doubled its investment in the site to more than $2 billion, and its workforce in Concord now clocks in at more than 750 people with room to grow, Manso said. Roughly 75% of the employees in Concord hail from North Carolina, she added.
The Concord site is one of several that has contributed to the $50 billion in manufacturing investments Lilly has charted since 2020, Manso said.
As part of that ongoing spend, Lilly in late February said it would plug $27 billion into four new U.S. production facilities in the coming years. Lilly is still narrowing down the locations for the upcoming sites, which will comprise three active pharmaceutical ingredient factories and a fourth for production of injectable drugs.
The move seemingly came in response to the threat of Trump administration import tariffs on pharmaceuticals and related products. While the president has continued to tease the prospect of trade duties on drugs coming into the U.S., tariffs on the industry have yet to materialize or be outlined concretely.
Still, Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, has already come out in critique of the proposed trade strategy.
Speaking to investors during Lilly’s first-quarter earnings call in May, Ricks acknowledged his company’s support for government efforts to increase domestic manufacturing in the U.S.
“However, we don’t believe tariffs are the right mechanism,” he said, instead highlighting the potential of “enhanced” tax incentives or an extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to spur U.S. investments.