According to the company, the entire sum of $400m (€361m) will be invested at its Lilly Technology Center campus in Indianapolis, US.
The focus of the investment will be on enhancing existing manufacturing facilities that produce insulin, building out additional capacity for its portfolio of diabetes medicines and for its pipeline of medicines.
In a statement, Eli Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, said that the expansion had been made possibly directly by the tax reform measures passed by President Trump, which Ricks had publicly supported when first proposed by Republicans. He stated that the tax reforms had created more capital with which to invest in operations.
The company’s president of manufacturing operations, Myles O’Neill, highlighted that capacity will be added to its active ingredients production, as well as technology upgrades to syringe filling, device assembly and packaging operations.
All told, the creation of additional capacity and enhancements to operations will create 100 jobs for the state of Indiana, where Lilly is headquartered.
The expansion of manufacturing operations and the creation of new jobs follows repeated demands for such action by President Trump towards the pharma industry.
In the same announcement, Lilly noted that it had invested over $5bn in the US since 2012, matching a similar amount that Pfizer proposed it would spend, beginning last year through to 2023, in the US.
If Lilly is taken at its word, having been directly influenced by the tax reform, then it would represent an additional example of political pressure being linked to the company’s business strategy.
Earlier this year, Lilly launched a generic version of its Humalog (insulin lispro) that reduced the price against the branded product by 50%, after fierce criticism of pricing behaviors at a Senate hearing on the issue of rising drug prices.
