Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is breaking ground on its $6.5 billion campus in northeast Houston, a massive investment that could transform the region into a critical manufacturing hub for the booming GLP-1 industry while generating thousands of jobs.
Lilly held a formal ceremony Monday to mark the start of construction on its 236-acre campus planned in Generation Park, McCord Global’s master-planned commercial park situated near Beltway 8, about 10 miles east of George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
The plant, where Lilly expects to make a new pill-form of a GLP-1 drug, will span at least six buildings totaling roughly 808,359 square feet, according to state filings, which are subject to change. Construction is expected to conclude November 2027, according to the filings. It’s not clear whether those plans encompass the entire development.
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The plant is expected to generate 4,000 construction jobs and about 600 permanent positions, including engineers, scientists, operations staff and lab technicians, the global drugmaker has previously said.
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To shore up its talent pipeline in the region, Lilly said Monday that it is providing $12.5 million to San Jacinto College to help establish training programs for students pursuing advanced chemical synthesis manufacturing careers. It's also donating $2.5 million to the community San Jacinto College Foundation to support scholarships. The news comes roughly a year after the community college opened a biotech training center within Generation Park.
Lilly's project represents the largest biotech manufacturing investment in Texas ever and one of the biggest single corporate investments in the Houston region, the Greater Houston Partnership has previously said.
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Last year, Governor Greg Abbott said Lilly would receive $146 million in tax incentives from the state’s Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation program, plus a $5.5 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund.
The project puts Houston at the center of the fast-growing weight loss industry, which has exploded in recent years with the advent of injectable GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy. In April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved of Lilly’s oral GLP-1 drug called orforglipron, under the brand name Foundayo, which allows patients to take the weight-loss drug in the form of a daily pill instead of a weekly injection.
"This $6.5 billion investment will help change the game for tens of millions of people suffering from overweight, obesity and its consequences like diabetes," said David A. Ricks, Lilly’s CEO, in a statement Monday.
Expected to rollout globally in 2027, Foundayo is made with small molecules, rather than peptides, making it easier to manufacture at scale, Lilly said. The drugmaker is also studying the pill for other uses, including type 2 diabetes and obstructive sleep apnea.
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The Houston plant could also be used to make other small molecule medicines across a range of therapeutic needs, from cancer treatments to immunology to neuroscience. The facility will also make oligonucleotide therapies, "a class of new medicines that work at the RNA level to switch off specific proteins that cause diseases," Ricks said at the event Monday.