Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Eli Lilly and Co.’s decision to invest another $5.3 billion in its Boone County manufacturing complex was one of the fastest the company has made in recent history, in an effort to turbo-charge production for two of its most popular drugs.
“We made this decision February in our boardroom,” David Ricks, the Indianapolis drugmaker’s CEO, told an audience Friday morning at the Global Economic Summit at the Indiana Convention Center. “We really didn’t have time to do a big search.”
At the time, Lilly was overwhelmed by demand for its diabetes treatment Mounjaro and its weight-loss treatment Zepbound. The company had launched Zepbound in December and projected consumer demand to be similar to a drug made by Danish competitor Novo Nordisk called semaglutide, sold under the brands Ozempic and Wegovy.
But, in the first two months, demand for Zepbound was four times that for semaglutide, Ricks said.
“So, a few months into the launch, we said we have to expand this, and this was going to be a bottleneck, the active pharmaceutical ingredient part,” Ricks said.
Mounjaro and Zepbound combined to generate more than $2 billion sales in this year’s first quarter. Analysts expect the two drugs to eventually generate well over $30 billion in combined annual sales, according to the data firm FactSet.
Company officials decided it would be faster to expand development on an existing real estate footprint than create a new, greenfield site. They quickly zeroed in on Lilly’s in-progress, 600-acre manufacturing complex in Lebanon, which seemed to offer the most flexibility to add manufacturing capacity, Ricks said. The $5.3 billion is the largest manufacturing investment in the company’s history, and brings Lilly’s total investment at the site to $9 billion.
The company had broken ground on the site last year and had already committed $3.7 billion to erect 12 buildings, several of which will be outfitted with highly automated machinery to make active pharmaceutical ingredients for Mounjaro, Zepbound and other drugs, along with cell and gene therapies.
Construction is still in early stages and the company hopes to begin producing drug ingredients there in 2026. The company said the site footprint will not expand, but the company will fill in the property with more buildings and equipment. It is located in the LEAP Lebanon Innovation District. LEAP stands for Limitless Exploration Advanced Pace.
“What we’ll be doing is adding nodes of capacity to that site—that is, new buildings that are basically replicas of the original five or six building that we’re going to build there.”
He did not specify how many more buildings would be erected, but said the manufacturing capacity will almost triple there. Lilly officials did not disclose what the manufacturing capacity is now or what the additional capacity figure will be.
The company worked quickly with the Indiana Economic Development Corp., which added a package of financial incentives, which have not yet been disclosed.
“I think I called you six weeks ago and said we want to do this,” Ricks told Gov. Eric Holcomb in a “fireside chat” Friday at the summit about economic collaborations. “Let’s put a package together. Let’s make this work.”
Holcomb said Lilly’s decision represented one of the best corporate announcements in his tenure.
“We aim here in the state of Indiana to make you proud, to make you look back 10 or 20 years from now and view this as one of the wisest decisions that’s been made,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Todd Young, who joined Holcomb and Ricks at a press conference, praised Lilly and Indiana officials for working quickly on a major economic project.
“I have 49 pairs of co-workers from the other states, and they salivate every time there’s a leading company poised to make a major investment in the country,” Young said. “And the fact that Eli Lilly continues to choose to invest in the state of Indiana speaks well to the company and its culture.”
Lilly officials did not say how quickly the company would be able to address the shortage of Zepbound and Mounjaro. Both drugs are listed on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration drug shortage database.
But Ricks said he hoped to shorten the construction process considerably.
“It takes three or four years to build these sites,” he said. “I don’t have three or four years. I need to do it in two or three and we need to break the records on speed.”
From left, Indiana Secretary of Commerce David Rosenberg, Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and U.S. Sen. Todd Young of Indiana.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.