What do North Car­oli­na and Ire­land have in com­mon? A tra­di­tion of friend­ly peo­ple, a deep ap­pre­ci­a­tion of brew­eries, and now, new Eli Lil­ly man­u­fac­tur­ing sites, set to hire 900 peo­ple.

In­di­anapo­lis-based Eli Lil­ly will pump al­most $1.5 bil­lion in­to the two new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties, the com­pa­ny an­nounced on Fri­day. The short-term fo­cus of these plants will be to bol­ster di­a­betes and can­cer prod­ucts, while the sites will take on Alzheimer’s and obe­si­ty med­ica­tions in the long run.

In Lim­er­ick, Ire­land, a $446 mil­lion in­vest­ment will ex­pand the ac­tive phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­gre­di­ent and mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body pro­duc­tion. In Con­cord, NC, about 25 miles from Char­lotte, a $1 bil­lion project will fo­cus on in­jecta­bles and med­ical de­vices. This means that in the last five years, Lil­ly has pumped $4 bil­lion in­to glob­al man­u­fac­tur­ing, in­clud­ing $2 bil­lion in the US.

The lo­cal gov­ern­ments for both cities have of­fered tremen­dous help through­out the process, pres­i­dent of man­u­fac­tur­ing Ed Her­nan­dez said in a call with End­points News Fri­day.

Both lo­cal­i­ties of­fered tax in­cen­tives to grow in their re­spec­tive re­gions, though the specifics were not dis­closed. This is the sec­ond new site to be built in North Car­oli­na in the past two years, as plans for a Re­search Tri­an­gle Park site were an­nounced in 2020. Con­struc­tion is well along at that site, and the com­pa­ny has al­ready hired about 100 peo­ple.

The com­pa­ny has brought 16 new prod­ucts to mar­ket in the last eight years, and it plans to bring an­oth­er five in the next two years, in­clud­ing the obe­si­ty drug tirzepatide and the ear­ly Alzheimer’s treat­ment do­nanemab.

“It’s a good sign when we need to build new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties, be­cause it means you’re ei­ther de­vel­op­ing new med­ica­tions, or the med­ica­tions that you’ve got out in the mar­ket are help­ing more peo­ple, and you need to make more,” Mike Ma­son, head of Lil­ly di­a­betes, said. “For us, it’s a com­bi­na­tion of both.”

Rough­ly 600 peo­ple will be hired in North Car­oli­na, and an­oth­er 300 in Ire­land. Both re­gions have a strong pool of tal­ent, and Lil­ly has con­nec­tions with lo­cal in­sti­tu­tions. In North Car­oli­na, the re­la­tion­ships are with com­mu­ni­ty col­leges in the area, as well as NC State and the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na-Char­lotte. In Ire­land, that con­nec­tion is pri­mar­i­ly with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lim­er­ick.

“Mak­ing med­i­cine, it’s a com­plex busi­ness. So we’re hir­ing en­gi­neers, sci­en­tists, phar­ma­cists, qual­i­ty con­trol staff, lab tech­ni­cians and op­er­a­tors,” Her­nan­dez said. “The fact that we have good re­la­tion­ships with lo­cal uni­ver­si­ties, that’s key in help­ing us get­ting the peo­ple we need to get.”

It’s an­oth­er huge get for North Car­oli­na Gov. Roy Coop­er, who has been of­fer­ing in­cen­tives for com­pa­nies to add man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions in the state over the course of the last year.

“Lil­ly’s choice brings more good jobs to North Car­oli­na from one of our most im­por­tant in­dus­tries,” he said in a state­ment. “North Car­oli­na has be­come a pre­mier hub for the world, thanks to our ex­cep­tion­al work­force and com­mit­ment to ed­u­ca­tion.”

While European companies, including BioNTech, are focused on increasing vaccine access to African countries by setting up vaccine manufacturing facilities, the European Union is looking westward to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Speaking at a press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pédro Sanchez, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU is launching a new initiative for vaccines and medicines manufacturing in Latin America, to get drugs to Latin America and the Caribbean faster.

GSK is continuing to build out its Barnard Castle site in the UK.

According to the company, it has opened a new aseptic smart manufacturing facility at the site, which is located in County Durham in the northeast of England.

The new facility, known as Q Block, is a fully automated and digital facility that leverages digital technology to make manufacturing operations as efficient as possible.

The 11,500-square-meter facility started construction in 2018 and according to the UK news site Business Live, the costs for the new building were £90 million, or around $110 million.

A drug manufacturing facility in Mexico is drawing the ire of the FDA after it ignored the US regulator’s inspection requests and phone calls.

According to the warning letter issued on June 13, Glicerinas Industriales refused a pre-announced inspection during a phone call with FDA prior to the inspection at the company’s facility in Zapopan, Mexico, a city next to Guadalajara, which was planned for May 16 to May 20.

Covid vaccine access to lower- and middle-income nations has been a concern during the length of the pandemic, but BioNTech is now pushing forward with plans to increase vaccine access for Africa.

Construction work has kicked off for an mRNA manufacturing facility in Kigali, Rwanda. According to BioNTech, the facility, dubbed the African modular mRNA manufacturing facility, has a target for the first set of manufacturing tools to be delivered to the site by the end of this year.

GSK, newly branded and soon-to-be demerged, shared interim results from its Phase II trial on its chronic hepatitis B treatment, one that it says has the “potential to lead to a functional cure.”

At a presentation at the EASL International Liver Congress, GSK shared that in around 450 patients who received its hep B drug bepirovirsen for 24 weeks, just under 30% had hepatitis B surface antigen and viral DNA levels that were too low to detect.