High tides: Lilly’s $20bn spend, Amgen preps network to enter GLP-1 space

For the third quarter 2024, Eli Lilly saw revenues of $11.4 billion, up 20% year-on-year. Removing the drop in revenue following the sale of its small-molecule antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (olanzapine) portfolio to Cheplapharm last year, sales grew 42%, driven by Mounjaro and Zepbound (both tirzepatide), which pulled in $3.1 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively.

Despite missing forecast in sales this quarter, tirzepatide is part of the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist wave that is projected to pull in yearly sales of $150 billion by 2032. Coupled with Novo Nordisk’s top selling Ozempic and Wegovy (both semaglutide), GLP-1s have become part of mainstream discourses and even health policies due to their success in treating type-2 diabetes and weight loss.

As such, Lilly has spent heavily on its manufacturing network to support these products and, according to CEO Dave Ricks, will continue to do so.

“Our manufacturing expansion agenda remains a top priority,” he said in the firm’s Q3 results call. “In September, we invested nearly $2 billion to increase our manufacturing footprint in Ireland.”

The Irish investment – which includes GLP-1s but will also support other products in Lilly’s portfolio, including the recently approved Alzheimer's disease treatment Kisunla (donanemab) – followed investments of $5.3 billion at a site in Indiana, $2 billion in North Carolina, and $2.5 billion in Germany. And these were just in the past 12 months.

“This [the Irish investment] brings the total commitments to build, upgrade, and acquire manufacturing facilities announced since 2020 to more than $20 billion.”

Ricks said that figure does not include the recent $4.5 billion invested to develop the Lilly Medicine Foundry. He told stakeholders this facility in Lebanon, Indiana “will be dedicated to research and development for manufacturing process design and to develop high-quality investigational medicines for our clinical trials.” The center will not solely serve GLP-1s, but that modality will remain at the forefront of Lilly’s product range given its upward trajectory.

Amgen

Fellow Big Pharma firm Amgen, with its own GLP-1 MariTide (maridebart cafraglutide, formerly AMG 133) in the clinic, reiterated the need to invest in its own manufacturing network during its third-quarter call this week.

Talking about the MariTide program, CFO Peter Griffith said CAPEX has been raised to about $1.3 billion in 2024, up 25% year-on-year.

“We certainly are investing where we always say we will in innovation, and MariTide is right at the front of that,” he said. “We look forward to investing to be a key player in this global public health crisis.”

Amgen is currently planning a Phase III trial testing MariTide in obesity-related conditions and type 2 diabetes, but the firm has previously said it is investigating broader indications in light of competition from Novo Nordisk and Lilly in the GLP-1 space.

“We're obviously very drawn to those domains where we have longitudinal expertise and experience around cardiovascular risk reduction,” CSO and EVP of R&D James Bradner said earlier this year.

“But if there's any advantage to being third in line, it’s that so much of the biomedical community is now activated to study the plausible role of GLP-1s and in different disease processes that we harvest a lot of these learnings as well. […] So, I think that we're not restricting our focus to those familiar areas, because […] we need to follow the science and just read through the impact of this medicine to all the serious diseases where patients stand to benefit.”