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On the sprawling downtown Indianapolis campus of drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co., more than 12,000 scientists, sales managers, technology workers and other employees work in laboratories and offices on a wide range of projects.
But don’t get the idea that Lilly is just an Indianapolis company. It also has hundreds of scientists in the coastal research hotbeds of San Francisco and San Diego.
And this month, Lilly opened its newest research center, a sprawling 346,000-square-foot operation housed in a 12-story building overlooking the Boston Seaport. The research center cost Lilly $700 million.
The drugmaker said this month that the new digs will help it advance efforts in RNA- and DNA-based therapies, as well as discovering new drug targets to create new medicines for diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, neurodegeneration and chronic pain.
It’s also a way to help attract more scientists who might want to work in a brand-new research center in a hopping East Coast city.
“I’m super, super, super excited,” Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer, told the Boston Globe. “It’s a building a scientist can love. I’m a scientist, so I’m in love.”
Lilly is moving about 200 scientists and researchers who had worked in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the new center, and plans to add about 300 employees.
The drugmaker, which is riding high on huge revenue and a climbing stock price from new drugs for obesity, diabetes and other conditions, said it wants to collaborate more with other companies and institutions by “fostering a culture of shared expertise and real-time learning to accelerate the development of novel medicines.”
The building will also house a biotech incubator for about a dozen startups.
Hosting biotechs gives Lilly a chance to connect with companies and learn about their technology, wrote FiercePharma, an industry news site.
For Lilly CEO David Ricks, that means “a lot more touch points in the ecosystem for future perhaps M&A, perhaps licensing or maybe just a collaboration in another sense,” Fierce Pharma reported.
STAT, an online news site for health and medicine, called Lilly’s new research center a “sizeable and conspicuous bet.”
“It’s also the latest attempt to deal with one of the biggest challenges in drug development: What should a company do when it wins big?” the news site said.
In this case, winning big means Lilly’s big revenue and profit from diabetes treatment Mounjaro and obesity treatment Zepbound. The drugmaker has a hefty pipeline of experimental drugs, but opening the new site can help it come up with even more ideas—in this case, by engineering basic mechanisms of human genetics.
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Nice building too bad it’s not in Indianapolis.
Lilly employment is up by more than 400 YTD in Indianapolis. That’s more than the number of new employees that Lilly plans on hiring in Boston. This new Boston building mostly seems like an initiative to consolidate workers from various Boson acquisitions.
Anecdotally, prices to fly between Indy & Boston have been high. Lilly is probably driving a lot of that demand.