GLP-1 heavyweights Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are trading haymakers as they scale up production to meet the overwhelming demand for their revolutionary obesity drugs.
A month after Lilly revealed a $5.3 billion investment to increase its manufacturing capacity, Novo has answered.
On Monday, the Danish drugmaker said it will spend $4.1 billion to construct a second fill-finish plant at its sprawling campus in Clayton, North Carolina. At 1.4 million square feet, the site will match the combined floor space of Novo’s three current manufacturing sites in the state, the company said.
At the new plant, Novo will produce blood sugar modulating treatments Ozempic, for diabetes, and Wegovy, for obesity. The outlay is part of Novo’s planned $6.8 billion investment in manufacturing this year, up from $3.9 billion in 2023.
“This is yet another real signal of our efforts to scale up our production to meet the growing global need for our life-changing medicines,” Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, Novo’s CEO, said in a release.
With the expansion, Novo plans to add 1,000 employees. Its current headcount in the state is 2,500. Additionally, the construction project will employ as many as 2,000 contractors at its peak, Novo said. Clearing and foundation work is already underway. Stages of the phased-in buildup will be completed between 2027 and 2029.
In March of 2023, without revealing any construction plans, Novo made room for expansion by purchasing 104 acres adjacent to its complex in Clayton for $6.8 million.
Novo is building the site to be environmentally sustainable, with innovative water strategies and a solar panel roof, the company said.
Novo began operating in Clayton in 1993, growing its first plant at the campus through several expansions to 457,000 square feet. Its second plant at the site came online in 2021 and at the time was the largest life science project ever in North Carolina at $2 billion. It was Novo’s first facility outside of Denmark to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients.
In 2022, the company opened a 180,000-square-foot site 40 miles to the northeast in Durham. There, it manufactures its oral semaglutide product Rybelsus. Novo bought the plant from Purdue Pharma in 2019.
“Clayton was the first manufacturing site for Novo Nordisk in the US, and this new, large-scale investment confirms the continued importance of our production facilities there as cornerstones of our company’s growth,” Henrik Wulff, Novo’s product supply, quality & IT chief, said in the release.
Novo has production sites in Denmark, U.S., France, Brazil and China, employing nearly 20,000 in its manufacturing unit. The company’s parent Novo Holdings is trying to bolster production capabilities with a $16.5 billion buyout of CDMO giant Catalent. As part of the deal, Novo Nordisk would gain three fill-finish sites for $11 billion.