USA — Eli Lilly has announced that it will invest US$450 million in a North Carolina manufacturing plant to meet the rising demand for its diabetes drugs Mounjaro and Trulicity.
The investment in the Research Triangle Park plant will increase filling, device assembly, and packaging capacity, allowing the Indiana-based drugmaker to double injectable drug production by the end of 2023.
Following recent shortages in its diabetes drugs, Trulicity and Mounjaro, the pharma giant said the move is meant to increase capacity for parenteral filling, device assembly, and packaging for those products.
The increased production of Trulicity and Mounjaro, Lilly’s newest diabetes drug, comes as rival Novo Nordisk struggles to produce enough of its obesity drug Wegovy, which belongs to the same class of blood-sugar-lowering drugs as Lilly’s.
Novo Nordisk has also seen increased demand for its new diabetes medications, Ozempic and Wegovy because of the increased hype surrounding the drugs on social media, particularly among celebrities.
As a result, an increasing number of people are attempting to obtain the drug for off-label use to treat obesity and aid in weight loss.
The FDA approved Novo Nordisk’s Rybelsus as a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes in January. Prior to the latest approval, the drug could only be prescribed after patients had exhausted all other options.
Later this year, Lilly may receive expanded approval for Mounjaro as a weight-loss treatment.
The new investment will be in a plant the company started building in 2020 and to which it has committed US$1.7 billion. Lilly is preparing for an FDA inspection of the site and plans for production to begin there later this year.
According to Lilly, the new phase of the facility will be completed in 2027, adding 100 jobs to the 460 that were originally planned.
Furthermore, Lilly has begun construction on two new facilities in Indiana to support new product launches.
With another 400 million euros (US$435 million) set aside for investment in biologics production in Ireland, the company expects to spend around US$2.5 billion on drug manufacturing capacity over the next several years.
Furthermore, the move is the latest in a series of efforts by pharmaceutical companies to increase the production of diabetes drugs as demand skyrockets.
The Food and Drug Administration announced in late 2022 that Mounjaro and Trulicity were in short supply.
Mounjaro was approved by the FDA as an injectable diabetes treatment in May 2022. Trulicity is Eli Lilly’s best-selling drug, earning US$5.5 billion in the first nine months of 2022.
Eli Lilly stated in its announcement that it intends to launch several new medicines in 2023, focusing on diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s, and cancer and that the increase in manufacturing will assist the company in doing so.
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