An injector of Zepbound, Eli Lilly’s weight loss drug, is shown in Recent York on December 11, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Eli Lilly on Friday said it was investing another $5.3 billion in WA Production facility in Lebanon, Indiana, to escalate the supply of the wildly popular weight-loss drug Zepbound, the diabetes drug Mounjaro and other drugs.
Over the past year, demand for these treatments has far outstripped supply, which is a boost deficiencies in the USA and forces the pharmaceutical giant to make significant investments to escalate the scale of production.
This up-to-date commitment brings Eli Lilly’s total investment in the facility to $9 billion. This makes it Eli Lilly’s largest manufacturing investment in its nearly 150-year history, company CEO David Ricks said in a statement.
Eli Lilly expects the Lebanon facility to begin producing drugs in overdue 2026 and scale operations by 2028. The company first announced plans to build up-to-date plants in Indiana in 2022.
The plant will specifically escalate Eli Lilly’s ability to produce the energetic ingredient in Zepbound and Mounjaro, called tirzepatid. The company calls these drugs incretin drugs, which mimic the action of certain gut hormones to suppress appetite and regulate blood sugar levels.
“At this multi-site campus, our newest medicines, including Zepbound and Mounjaro, will support pipeline development and leverage the latest technologies and automation for maximum efficiency, safety and quality control,” Ricks said in a statement.
Eli Lilly said 900 employees, including engineers, scientists, operations staff and lab technicians, will work at the plant when it is fully operational.
Since 2020, the company has spent more than $18 billion to build, expand and acquire manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Europe.
Eli Lilly has several manufacturing plants that are “expanding or under construction,” Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi told investors on an earnings call last month. This includes a plant in Lebanon and another location in Indiana, two locations in North Carolina, one in Ireland, one in Germany and a seventh location that the company recently acquired from Nexus Pharmaceuticals.
Investors cheered Eli Lilly after the company raised its full-year revenue forecast by $2 billion, in part because of confidence in increased production of Zepbound, Mounjaro and other incretin drugs for the rest of the year.
“Now that we’re four months into the year, we have better insight into these potential nodes and we feel more confident,” Ashkenazi said in a telephone interview.
