Eli Lilly to invest $5B in Goochland plant, creating 650 jobs

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. plans to invest $5 billion in a manufacturing facility in Goochland County that’s expected to create 650 permanent jobs and support 1,800 construction jobs, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Tuesday.

According to the governor’s office, the project’s an upgrade from the pharma company’s previous plans, which called for a $2.148 billion investment and hiring 468 workers.

Located in the West Creek Business Park, the facility’s production area will be more than 200,000 square feet, not including offices and other spaces.

The plant will produce antibody drug conjugates, Lilly Chair and CEO David A. “Dave” Ricks said Tuesday at a press conference held in Richmond’s Main Street Station.

“It’s a combination of two special kinds of medicine: one to guide, say, a chemotherapy just to cancer cells, and then the therapy itself to kill the cancer cell,” he said. “That sort of combination medicine is at the cutting edge of science we have today, and we’re building that right here.”

The Goochland facility will be one of four plants Lilly is building nationwide as part of a $50 billion initiative to increase its domestic pharmaceutical production.

“Lilly is now defining the standard for building new manufacturing sites in our country,” Ricks said, “a new network that will strengthen our supply resilience, that will scale innovation, create an export economy and ensure reliable access to life-saving, life-changing medications. Today marks an important milestone in bringing that vision to life.”

Additionally, he said, “our new site in Goochland County … will be our first dedicated, fully integrated active pharmaceutical ingredient and drug product facility for cancer, autoimmune conditions and other advanced therapies.”

In August, the state Major Employment Investment Project Approval Commission (MEI) unanimously voted to recommend that the General Assembly approve state incentives packages valued at more than $10 million apiece for Lilly and AstraZeneca, which is expected to propose a project in Albemarle County, according to a state official.

The Goochland facility ‘will truly break barriers of delivering solutions, cures, health to not just Virginians and Americans, but around the world,” Youngkin said Tuesday. “A facility that is breaking through some of the historic norms of combining active pharmaceutical ingredients and the manufacturing of the pharmaceutical itself in the same place, doing it in a campus where innovation will … literally find its home and its destination right here in the commonwealth of Virginia.”

Goochland’s West Creek Business Park, where Lilly is building its facility, is home to Fortune 500 used car retailer CarMax’s headquarters and a campus for Fortune 100 financial services company Capital One Financial.

Construction is expected to begin imminently and take about three years, Ricks said in response to a Virginia Business question, although the facility likely won’t be manufacturing antibody drug conjugates at that point.

“We’re ready to go now. We’ll begin with ground preparation, permitting and all that, and you’ll see activity on the site in the coming weeks, so it’s going to happen quickly,” Ricks said.

“The typical timeline for a facility like this is five years,” he added. “That seems like a very long time to me, … so we’d like to beat that timeline. That includes regulatory approval processes, which can be up to a year, so we’re working with the federal administration, FDA and others to speed those timelines up.

“But within three years, we’ll be having sort of a facility built. It will look like a manufacturing site. The rest is up to the regulatory approval process … making sure we can make the medicine perfectly from there,” he said.

In terms of hiring full-time workers, “that will evolve over the coming year or two,” Ricks said. “There’s quite a bit of training required to begin working in a pharmaceutical plant, so we have a bit of a runway in front of that, but we’ll be excited to engage with community partners to find permanent talent for the site in the coming years.”

The average wage in Lilly plants is about $100,000 a year, Ricks said, and “the benefits our workers in the plant have are the same ones I have.”

Ricks said he expects that once the facility is operational and running with 650 employees, “the vast majority will be from the community here in Virginia.” Often there is a single-digit percentage of employees in management rotating between sites to share expertise, he said, “but engineering and certainly almost all, if not all, the operators … and technicians will be from the region.”

The Virginia Economic Development Partnership will support Lilly through the Virginia Talent Accelerator Program. Created by VEDP in collaboration with the Virginia Community College System, the program provides free customizable workforce recruitment and training services to qualified new and expanding companies.

Choosing the plant’s location was a competitive process, Ricks said.

“We chose Virginia,” he said, “because we have learned we have reliable partners here and great people who turn commitments into results. … We did a request for information originally in February to land the site and received over 400 responses from across the country, from 46 states, and we chose this site amongst all those.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin said a team, including himself, visited Lilly in Indianapolis. The trip included walking a manufacturing line and meeting employees, he said.