Eli Lilly unveils new North Carolina plant for GLP-1 drugs

Eli Lilly and Company (LLY) unveiled a new manufacturing plant in North Carolina on Friday, which, according to the pharmaceutical giant, is expected to alleviate manufacturing bottlenecks for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs in high demand.

Yahoo Finance Health Reporter Anjalee Khemlani joins Market Domination Overtime to break down Eli Lilly's investment into the new plant and what it means for the company moving forward.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination Overtime.

This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video transcript

On Friday, Eli Lilly unveiled its newest manufacturing plant in Concord, North Carolina, which the company says will help relieve manufacturing bottlenecks for G LP one drugs here with more young finances, Angeli Kamlani, who got a first hand look at the plant.

There is a lot of demand for these drugs as we know.

And one of the only limiting factors has been supply, one of the limiting factors has been parts of the supply chain.

So that yes, the supply chain is the problem.

And so what Eli Lilly do is in unveiling this plan, they're talking about one part of that, which is the injectable pens.

That's one of the key shortages as well as of course, the drug product itself.

So this specific plant is going to be helping with the relief on those injectable pens.

The company expects this plant which is a million plus square feet to be live by early next year.

So 2025.

So this is not even something that we're going to see within the next couple of months.

It's something still as a next year timeline, we did get a chance to look inside.

There are some really interesting things that they sort of stood up, they're looking at how to make it more efficient faster.

So that includes, you know, robotics as part of the process.

So, automating parts of the process where humans are not necessarily needed, that's one of the areas.

And we do know also that they were able to stand up this building in basically about two years, five years is about the average for a plant like this of this size and magnitude and they were able to do it in two years.

They also doubled the amount of they were investing initially $1 billion increasing it to 2 billion.

So that is a lot about how much the company is really looking to invest in, not just this but other plants as well.

And that's, that's important part to remember, this is just one of the plans of about seven total that the company has planned.

And I will let you listen to Edgardo Hernandez who is head of manufacturing at Lily.

Tell you a little bit more about that.

We have announced $18 billion of investment since 2020 today.

I mean, so we're building two facilities here in North Carolina.

There's two facilities that we're building in Lebanon and north of our facility in Indianapolis.

Uh We also announced investments in Ireland as well and in Germany uh recently.

And also, as you probably know, I mean, we announced the acquisition of a facility in the Kenosha County in Wisconsin as well, which is part of a parental fleet of facilities.

So as you know, the race to get more manufacturing is one of the problems, not just Eli Lilly, but its competitor, Novo is also facing Novo.

We know of course the parent uh holdings company did acquire Catalan or is it trying to acquire Catalan manufacturing plant?

So they're really, you know, double sided efforts to try and get more international manufacturing as well online in order to feed this craze.