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The Lebanon Plan Commission on Tuesday night unanimously approved a design plan for Eli Lilly and Co.’s $4.5 billion center for advanced manufacturing and drug development at the LEAP Research and Innovation District.
In October, Indianapolis-based Lilly announced the newest investment at its manufacturing site in Boone County. The 200-acre Lilly Medicine Foundry is expected to add 400 full-time jobs for highly skilled workers, including engineers, scientists, operations personnel and lab technicians.
The Lilly Medicine Foundry will be designed to give the pharmaceutical maker the ability to research new ways of producing medicines, while also scaling up manufacturing of drugs for clinical trials.
“The medicine foundry and what we represent is the clinical supply for what would eventually, if it’s commercialized, become the drugs for tomorrow’s Lilly portfolio,” Matt von Zirkelbach, site head of the Lilly Medicine Foundry, told Lebanon Plan Commission members.
The Lilly Medicine Foundry will feature a seven-building campus totaling 1.2 million square feet at the southwest corner of State Road 32 and County Road 200 West.
The buildings will be situated in an L-shape facing the roads with mechanical equipment located behind the buildings. The buildings will be connected by a central corridor with expansion capabilities on the western portion of the site.
Lebanon Planning Director Ben Bontrager said S.R. 32 will become four lanes with a median and limited access, while improvements will be made to C.R. 200 West, as well.
Five community members spoke during a public hearing at Tuesday night’s meeting. They expressed concerns about how the Lilly Medicine Foundry will impact people who live along C.R. 200 West and spoke about the impacts on traffic, quality of life and air pollution on residents. Some asked that Lilly purchase their properties.
“This is going to be really hard for me, again, but I appreciate the things that you are trying to do, and I know Lilly is a good company,” Laura Newman said. “But if you want to buy us out, that would be wonderful, because this is not the life we wanted.”
The funding for the Lilly Medicine Foundry brought the Indianapolis-based drugmaker’s total investment in the Lebanon site to more than $13 billion, making the development one of the largest capital projects in Indiana history.
It was also the fourth large investment in the site announced by Lilly since 2022. In total, Lilly plans to construct about 20 buildings on its 800-acre LEAP District campus. (LEAP stands for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace).
Lilly is one of only two announced LEAP tenants so far—the other being Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., which plans to invest up to $4.8 billion to construct a data center on 1,500 acres. And Lilly is the only tenant with shovels in the dirt. The drugmaker broke ground on its LEAP site in spring 2023.
The 9,000-acre LEAP District sits along Interstate 65 in Lebanon, roughly halfway between Purdue University and Indianapolis.
Lilly said in October that the foundry will allow it to further develop solutions to optimize manufacturing processes and increase capacity for clinical trial medicines, which are smaller batches in the testing phase for patients.
The foundry is not intended to run full-scale production of medicines. New manufacturing technologies developed at the foundry will be transferred to Lilly’s other manufacturing sites for full-scale production, the company said. The foundry is scheduled to open in late 2027.
Also being constructed now on Lilly’s manufacturing site in Lebanon are more than a dozen buildings for other manufacturing purposes. Nearly two years after Lilly broke ground in Lebanon, hundreds of construction workers are converting the rugged area from farmland into a massive industrial complex.
The earlier rounds of investments were made to fund the construction and equipment of buildings that will make active pharmaceutical ingredients for multibillion-dollar Lilly drugs, such as diabetes treatment Mounjaro and obesity treatment Zepbound along with cell and gene therapies.
Lilly’s previous investment announcements for the site were an initial $2.1 billion in May 2022, an additional $1.6 billion in April 2023, and an additional $5.3 billion in May 2024.
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IBJ just had an article comparing the vacancy rates of office parks along US31 in Carmel to the newer builds in Carmel City Center. The difference was striking and reflected the change in attitudes towards commercial office parks. This development appears to be more of the former than the latter, which is not a good sign. Regardless, the IEDC 1980s way of development is antiquated.