Eli Lilly and Company has announced a planned investment of more than $1.2 billion to expand and modernize its Lilly del Caribe manufacturing site in Carolina, Puerto Rico.  

This new investment will integrate technologies and expand production capacity within the existing campus to support the company’s growing portfolio of oral solid medicines in cardiometabolic health, neuroscience, oncology and immunology. 

The enhanced facility will be among those that will manufacture orforglipron, Lilly’s first oral, small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist, which the company expects to submit to global regulatory agencies for obesity by the end of 2025. Construction on the expanded oral solid medicine product manufacturing facility is estimated to begin in 2026, with plans to start producing medicine by the end of 2028. 

This facility will deploy technologies in oral solid medicine manufacturing, including dock-to-dock automation and material flow, paperless manufacturing, process analytical technology, and spray-dried dispersions, which allows oral medicines to be effectively absorbed. 

This strategic expansion is a part of the company’s previously announced $50-billion capital investment commitment to expand US manufacturing capacity. The company shared plans to build sites in Texas and Virginia earlier this year (2025), with two additional locations to be announced in the next few months (as reported on October 29, 2025). These new sites are part of Lilly’s broader efforts to expand existing US manufacturing sites to increase capacity. 

Source: Eli Lilly and Company