Novo Nordisk Breaks Ground on New $1.8 Billion North Carolina Manufacturing Facility
Novo Nordisk has broken ground on its new $1.8 billion diabetes medicine production facility in Clayton, North Carolina. The facility will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) for a range of Novo Nordisk’s current and future GLP-1 and insulin medicines. Once fully operational in 2020, the Clayton facility will ensure production capacity for diabetes medicines in the US for the decade ahead, according to the company.
Once complete, the new facility will measure 833,000 square feet and have a footprint of 417,639 square feet. The expansion is expected to create close to 700 new jobs. Novo Nordisk also expects to create employment during the construction period with up to 2,500 people working on the project at peak construction.
The new site is situated adjacent to Novo Nordisk’s 457,000-square foot Clayton facility. Expanded several times since it was inaugurated in 1996, Novo Nordisk’s current plant in Clayton, N.C. is one of the company’s strategic production sites responsible for formulation, filling, and packaging of diabetes medicines. The plant also assembles and packages the company’s FlexPen and FlexTouch prefilled insulin devices for the US market.
Once the new site becomes operational, the diabetes API production organization in Clayton will be named DAPI-US (Diabetes Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients – US). It will be part of the Danish diabetes API production organization in Kalundborg, which will be named DAPI-Denmark.
In August 2015, Novo Nordisk announced that it would invest $2 billion into production facilities in Clayton; Malov, Denmark; and Kalundborg, Denmark, with $1.8 billion of this amount being invested in the Clayton plant. Also in August 2015, the company announced plans to initiate Phase IIIa development of oral semaglutide, a GLP-1 analogue formulated as a once-daily tablet for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes.
Source: Novo Nordisk