About a month after disclosing a $50 billion investment in its U.S. operations, Roche is beginning to peel back the layers on its plans, starting with a new manufacturing facility in the Tar Heel State.
Roche has earmarked more than $700 million to construct a sprawling new plant for its Genentech unit in Holly Springs, North Carolina, where myriad large drugmakers have set up production operations in recent years.
The 700,000-square-foot facility will create more than 400 new manufacturing jobs once complete, not to mention some 1,500 construction jobs during the site’s buildout, Roche explained.
Once up and running, the facility will chip in on high-volume fill-and-finish work for Roche and Genentech’s future portfolio of next-generation obesity drugs—one of the chief areas Roche highlighted when announcing its wide-ranging U.S. investment plan last month.
At the time, Roche said it was planning to build a facility for next-generation weight loss drugs at an undetermined location. The selection of Holly Springs for the plant is the culmination of that plan, the town itself and Wake County Economic Development said in a joint release.
Meanwhile, Roche could expand on the initial $700-million tranche in the future depending on business needs and “the U.S. policy environment,” the company explained in its own press release Monday.
“Our new facility near Raleigh, North Carolina, an established biopharmaceutical talent hub, will serve as an important new setting within our manufacturing network to help deliver on the promise of our company’s life-changing science and industry-leading pipeline,” Genentech’s CEO, Ashley Magargee, said in a statement.
Upon announcing its $50-billion outlay last month, Roche joined a growing list of biopharma majors—both U.S.-based and otherwise—that have firmed up their commitments to the States as the second Trump administration continues to threaten pharmaceutical-specific import tariffs.
Roche, for its part, said that it would dispense its $50 billion over five years and target multiple different projects in various states. Aside from the new metabolic medicine plant in North Carolina, the company also aims to build a new plant in Indiana for continuous glucose monitoring devices and a state-of-the-art gene therapy facility in Pennsylvania.
Roche also firmed up plans on its diagnostics facility on Monday, announcing that it will spend up to $550 million by 2030 to establish a "major hub" for manufacturing of continuous glucose monitoring systems in the state capital of Indianapolis. Indianapolis is already the North American home base for Roche's diagnostics arm.
Roche will also chart expansions at its existing U.S. sites. In all, Roche and Genentech currently operate 13 manufacturing sites and 15 R&D sites across the U.S. The Holy Springs investment marks the company’s first in North Carolina.
The Tar Heel state has evolved into a booming biopharma nexus in recent years. Apart from the state’s Research Triangle Park—which serves as one of the country’s premier research hubs—Holly Springs itself is increasingly playing host to manufacturing operations from the likes of CSL Seqirus, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, Amgen and many other companies.
Meanwhile, even as Roche locks in on its U.S. business, the Swiss drug and diagnostics juggernaut isn’t neglecting its operations in other areas of the world.
Last week, the company said it would invest roughly 2.05 billion Chinese yuan ($282 million) to build out a new biomanufacturing hub in Shanghai, China. The facility, which will mark Roche’s second for branded medicines in the country, will be used primarily to produce the eye med Vabysmo (known domestically as Luoshijia) for the Chinese market.