Thousand Oaks pharma giant Amgen Inc. is doubling down on making North Carolina one of its major drug manufacturing centers.
The company announced Dec. 5 that it plans to open a $1 billion second drug manufacturing facility in Holly Springs, North Carolina. It’s next door to a $550 million facility that broke ground in 2022 and is set to open early next year.
“This expansion underscores our unwavering focus on bringing transformative medicines to patients around the world,” Robert Bradway, Amgen’s chief executive, said in the announcement.
Amgen is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies with revenue last year of $28 billion and a global workforce of approximately 25,000. The company has roughly three dozen individual drug lines, including well-known drugs such as Prolia, Embrel and Otezla. Recently, Amgen has been integrating drug lines from Horizon Therapeutics, the Irish pharmaceutical company that it acquired late last year.
To produce all these drugs, Amgen has a global manufacturing network, including facilities in its home state of California, Ohio, Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, Ireland, the Netherlands and Puerto Rico. The plant in Ohio, which is nearly 300,000 square feet, opened earlier this year.
Amgen has long eyed the Holly Springs, North Carolina, area as a potential manufacturing hub because of its proximity to the biotech cluster in the Research Triangle Park area in the Raleigh-Durham metro region and its considerable talent pool.
“North Carolina will be an important part of our global manufacturing network as we continue to meet the growing demand for our innovative therapies while generating significant local economic impact,” Bradway said.
In 2021, the company announced its first plant in Holly Springs; ground was broken on that $550 million, 350,000-square-foot facility in March 2022, and it’s expected to open early next year.
The company has not disclosed the square footage for this second plant, but if the $1 billion cost figure is any guide, it could should be nearly double the 350,000 square feet of the first facility.
According to Amgen spokeswoman Elissa Snook, the company currently has about 220 employees in North Carolina. That number is expected to increase early next year as the first plant opens. After the second plant opens and ramps up production, Snook said the total employment at the two plants should reach about 725 by 2030.
