Dive Brief:
- Eli Lilly will invest more than $3.5 billion in a new manufacturing facility in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, designed to make injectable weight-loss drugs and medical devices, the company said Friday.
- This is the fourth U.S. manufacturing site that Lilly has announced since last February. The project will bring 850 jobs to the area, including engineers, scientists, operations personnel and lab technicians, according to a news release. The site is expected to be operational in 2031.
- Lilly has received $100 million in support from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development for the project. It's the largest investment by a life sciences company in the state to date, officials said. Construction will begin this year.
Dive Insight:
Lilly purchased a site in Fogelsville, an unincorporated town, to build its first facility in Pennsylvania. The project has received $50 million in state tax credits and $50 million in expansion and job creation grants.
In relation to the project, the state is also providing up to $5 million to a local community college or technical school to offer workforce development services for the company. Pennsylvania accelerated the project as part of its PA Permit Fast Track Program, signed into effect November 2024.
Once completed, the manufacturing site will produce injectable weight-loss drugs, including retatrutide, as well as injection devices, according to the release. Retatrutide, a triple-hormone receptor agonist designed to treat obesity and type-2 diabetes, cleared late-stage trial results in December. Lilly said participants who stayed on the drug for 68 weeks lost on average 28.7% of their body weight and saw improvements in knee pain. More trials are expected this year as retatrutide awaits regulatory approval.
“To meet increasing demand, we’re expanding our U.S. manufacturing network, with Lehigh Valley adding capacity for next-generation weight-loss medicines,” David Ricks, Lilly chair and CEO, said in a statement. “We’re creating high-quality jobs and collaborating across the region — with suppliers, educators, and workforce-development partners — to make critical medicines in the U.S.”
Lilly has dedicated billions of dollars in recent months to its U.S. manufacturing expansion. In September, the company pledged $5 billion to construct a factory outside of Richmond, Virginia, for cancer and autoimmune treatments. In addition, it pledged $6.5 billion to build a Houston facility that will make its first obesity pill, among other medicines.
In December, Lilly also committed more than $6 billion to build a site in Huntsville, Alabama, for oral weight-loss treatments.
The company said these new plants, including the Lehigh Valley site, will leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, integrated monitoring and data analytics to make operations more efficient and reliable.
The investments are part of a broader initiative by Lilly to invest more than $50 billion to construct and refurbish its U.S. factories as President Donald Trump pressures companies to reshore operations through tariffs, tax incentives and other means.
In February 2025, when Lilly announced its expansion initiative, it was considered to be the largest commitment to domestic manufacturing by a pharmaceutical company in the past decade. Since then, other pharmaceutical giants such as Roche, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson have followed suit, making their own similar multibillion-dollar commitments to manufacturing, technology and research and development.
