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Buildings are starting to spring up at Eli Lilly and Co.’s construction site in Boone County, where the Indianapolis-based drugmaker is spending $3.7 billion to build a manufacturing campus to help turn out more medicines.
“It’s a year ago since we’ve broken ground, and a lot of progress has been made,” Patrik Jonsson, executive vice president at Lilly and president of the company’s diabetes and obesity unit, told an audience Tuesday morning at IBJ’s Life Sciences Power Breakfast.
“We have turned 600 acres into a construction site,” he added. “Buildings are being raised. … So a lot of progress.”
The company plans to develop at least 12 buildings totaling more than 1.6 million square feet. The Lilly project is expected to anchor a new innovation district northwest of Lebanon.
The site is known as the LEAP Research and Innovation District. Lebanon has already annexed at least 7,200 acres for the site. LEAP is short for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace.
The 12 buildings on the Lilly campus will range in size from a 3,200-square-foot visitors center to a pair of three-story, 330,000-square-foot manufacturing facilities.
The Indiana Economic Development Corp. has identified about 11,000 acres in Boone County for the large-scale research and innovation park. It has designated different areas for renewable-energy projects, shovel-ready development, research and development, and even a mixed-use village concept.
State officials have compared LEAP to the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and say its close proximity to Interstate 65, Purdue University and the city of Indianapolis made it the ideal choice for a high-tech manufacturing district.
The Indiana Economic Development’s role in orchestrating the LEAP district has come under fire in debates this year for the governor’s race. Candidate Curtis Hill, the former Indiana attorney general, has said the LEAP District is an example of state government “picking winners and losers.” He also has criticized the Boone County project for its need to take water from neighboring Tippecanoe County.
Candidate Eric Doden has called the project the kind of “top-down, state-driven approach” that is the opposite of community-based growth he says is needed in the state of Indiana.
Lilly’s investment of nearly $4 billion is expected to be the company’s largest capital expenditure on a single site. It is estimated to add 700 jobs and produce some of the company’s latest drugs.
“First and foremost, Indiana has been our home state for almost 150 years, although that alone, though, doesn’t make it,” Jonsson said. “It’s a very strategic location, with opportunities for growth and development with proximity to both the resource centers in Indiana, Indianapolis and Purdue.
“And the LEAP district overall, we foresee that to be a place of economic growth. And we want to be a part of that.”
So far, the company has hired more than 100 full-time employees at the site and expects to hire another 150 by the end of this year, Jonsson said.
The Lilly site’s buildings would include uses ranging from administrative offices, lab space, manufacturing, utilities, warehousing and a fire station.
One part of the campus would be focused on manufacturing active pharmaceutical ingredients. Another would be a cell and gene therapy site that would provide cutting-edge medicines for patients.
Together, they would make medicines for patients that are facing cancer, diabetes and other serious illnesses.
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