Eight months after more than doubling down on its construction of a $2 billion drug manufacturing facility in Holly Springs, North Carolina, Roche is making a similar move on the other side of the United States.
At the campus of its Genentech unit in Hillsboro, Oregon, Roche will invest $750 million to double the size of its existing production facility. The new outlay will support the construction of a fill-finish plant that will produce drug delivery devices, such as prefilled syringes and auto-injectors, which largely allow patients to administer drugs by themselves at home.
The 75-acre site, which is in the western suburbs of Portland, has been producing oncology, immunology and neurology treatments since it became operational 20 years ago.
The new facility, meanwhile, will provide end-to-end filling of low- and high-volume drug devices, giving Roche flexibility as its manufacturing needs change across its evolving portfolio, the company said. Roche plans for the plant to become operational in 2031 and bring 250 new, high-wage manufacturing jobs online.
“Thanks to its skilled workforce and strong community, Hillsboro remains vital to our U.S. operations,” Ashley Magargee, the CEO of Roche’s U.S. subsidiary Genentech, said in a release. “By adding end-to-end filling capabilities, this expansion deepens our commitment to manufacturing in the U.S. and gives us the flexibility to support a growing pipeline.”
In 2015, Roche revealed a plan to pour $125 million into an expansion of the Hillsboro facility, at the time pegged to add up to 100 jobs at the site. The outlay was part of a 2013 plan to spend $880 million to bolster Roche’s ability to produce biologic drugs. That initiative added 500 jobs in the U.S., Germany and Roche’s home country of Switzerland.
Fast forward to May of 2025, when Roche announced its plan to build a $700 million manufacturing facility in Holly Springs, designed to execute fill-finish for next-generation products for metabolic conditions such as obesity. Then, in January of this year, the company upped its ante at the site, saying it would spend a total of $2 billion in the buildup of the campus.
The Holly Springs and Hillsboro projects form part of an 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 R&D investment promises.
Under the Roche and Genentech umbrella in the U.S. are 13 manufacturing and 15 research and development sites, employing approximately 25,000 people across 24 locations in eight states, the companies said.