Eli Lilly wants the most optimal locations to host its new manufacturing facilities in the U.S.—and it’s open to pitches.
The Indianapolis pharma has established an online portal to accept submissions for possible locations of four future U.S. manufacturing sites.
Last week, Lilly unveiled an ambitious plan to invest $27 billion to build four new production facilities in the U.S. Three of the factories will focus on active pharmaceutical ingredients, and the fourth will produce injectable drugs.
Any state may consider a submission, a Lilly spokesperson told Fierce Pharma. The company is already engaged in negotiations with several states but welcomes additional filings by March 12, the spokesperson said.
“We expect to announce all four future site locations in 2025 and to provide more details on the specifics of each at that time,” the spokesperson added.
The online portal includes a multi-page submission form, which Lilly says must be completed in a single session because applicants' progress won’t be saved. The form itself takes about 15 minutes to 20 minutes to fill out, but the information would take some time to collect.
The form’s 67 blank spaces—not all of which are mandatory—ask for details in four large categories: basic site information, site attributes, logistics and utilities.
Under logistics, Lilly’s interested in access to interstates, railways and airports. Questions on utilities cover site information on electric power, gas, water supply, wastewater, telecommunications, environmental topics and more.
In response to rising demand for its popular diabetes and weight loss drug duo Mounjaro and Zepbound, Lilly has invested heavily to boost manufacturing capacity.
Some of the investments are being funneled to the company’s home state of Indiana, including two separate commitments of $5.3 billion and $4.5 billion unveiled last year. Other popular manufacturing destinations among biopharmaceuticals companies, such as North Carolina and Wisconsin, are also getting investments from Lilly.
The four new sites being devised will roughly double Lilly’s total U.S. investment commitments since 2020 to more than $50 billion.
Similarly, Novo Nordisk, Lilly’s main rival in the diabetes and obesity market, has also been pouring billions into manufacturing expansions, including a $4.1 billion outlay to build a second fill-finish plant at its campus in North Carolina.
But uncertainty around the wild outlook for the obesity market prompted one analyst to ask on a recent Lilly conference call “whether we are all significantly over our skis on this market and that the manufacturing build-out may simply be too aggressive.”
“I have zero doubt that we have still more building to do and that the capacity we put in the ground so far is not sufficient to meet global demand,” Lilly CEO David Ricks said on the call, weeks before the $27 billion announcement.
Thanks to Lilly’s manufacturing ramp-up, the FDA announced in December that the shortage of tirzepatide, the active ingredient used in Mounjaro and Zepbound, was over.
Besides churning out more GLP-1 drugs, Lilly’s massive investment in U.S. domestic manufacturing could earn the company some political capital under the Trump administration, which has been pushing for onshoring of manufacturing.
The pharma industry is in need of allies in Washington as it tries to counteract the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, fight for reform of pharmacy benefit managers and push for 340B drug pricing program changes. Trump has also threatened to impose certain forms of price controls to lower U.S. drug prices, a policy that the pharma industry opposes.