Eli Lilly plans $6.5 billion Texas manufacturing plant for obesity pill

Eli Lilly on Tuesday said it’ll spend $6.5 billion to construct a producing facility in Houston, Texas, to spice up production of the corporate’s pipeline of so-called small molecule drugs, including its closely watched experimental obesity pill. 

It’s the second in a string of latest planned U.S. investments by the drugmaker. Eli Lilly announced in February that it might spend at the very least $27 billion to construct 4 recent domestic manufacturing plants, adding to $23 billion in previous investments since 2020. 

Eli Lilly said it’ll announce the 2 remaining U.S. sites this yr. The corporate expects to start making medicines in any respect 4 facilities inside five years. 

That added production capability for Eli Lilly’s obesity pill, orforglipron, is crucial as the corporate races to bring it to market and tries to take care of its dominance within the booming marketplace for GLP-1s. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have previously faced supply constraints with their existing weekly injections, as demand skyrocketed within the U.S. 

“Our recent Houston site will enhance Lilly’s ability to fabricate orforglipron at scale and, if approved, help fulfill the drugs’s potential as an obesity and kind 2 diabetes treatment for tens of thousands and thousands of individuals worldwide preferring the benefit of a pill that might be taken without food and water restrictions,” Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks said in the discharge. 

Drugmakers have been scrambling to spice up their production within the U.S. as President Donald Trump threatens to impose tariffs on pharmaceuticals imported into the U.S. Trump has said those levies will encourage firms to re-shore production after domestic drug manufacturing shrank dramatically over the past decade.

In a release Tuesday, Eli Lilly said the brand new Houston plant will give attention to manufacturing orforglipron and the corporate’s pipeline of other small molecule medicines across different disease areas, including cardiometabolic health, oncology, immunology and neuroscience. Small molecule drugs, which regularly are available pill form, are more convenient for patients to take than injectable medications and are generally easier and cheaper to fabricate at scale.  

Eli Lilly said the positioning will bring 615 jobs to the Greater Houston area, including highly expert engineers, scientists, operations personnel and lab technicians, and 4,000 construction jobs.