Via C&EN, this good news for American manufacturing (article by Aayushi Pratap):
To meet astronomical demand for its weight-loss and antidiabetes drugs, Eli Lilly and Company says it will double its investment at a drug active-ingredient manufacturing site now under construction in Lebanon, Indiana.
The company will inject an additional $5.3 billion, increasing its total investment in the site to $9 billion. The expansion will boost the production of tirzepatide, the peptide-based active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) used in Zepbound and Mounjaro, weight-loss and antidiabetes medicines that the US Food and Drug Administration approved in 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Construction of the Indiana facility began in 2023. Lilly expects to start manufacturing at the site in 2026 and says it will increase production over the subsequent years. Once the facility is fully operational, it will employ 900 workers, including engineers, scientists, operating personnel, and lab technicians.
Since 2020, Lilly says, it has committed to spending $16 billion on new manufacturing sites in the US and Europe.
In a press release, Lilly CEO David A. Ricks says the overall project is “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.”
The investment comes as Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which manufactures the competing peptide-based drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, struggle to keep up with demand...
It will be really interesting to see what the site will look like eventually, but I could imagine 25-40ish chemists (of one stripe or another) at this site eventually? It will be interesting to see!
I am surprised that a $5B expansion only leads to an additional 900 jobs. Which means we all know realistically means only ~450 jobs will be created.
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