Roche is pledging to invest $50 billion in manufacturing and research infrastructure in the U.S. over the next five years, making the pharmaceutical giant the latest company to unveil a capital expenditure push as drugmakers prepare for expected tariffs from the Trump administration.
The Trump administration is still working out the details about how to apply tariffs to pharmaceuticals. But pharma companies could potentially avoid them by manufacturing more of their medicines in the U.S.
Basel, Switzerland-based Roche currently maintains 13 manufacturing and 15 R&D sites in the U.S. across its pharmaceutical and diagnostics divisions. These sites employ more than 25,000. Roche’s U.S. presence includes South San Francisco-based subsidiary Genentech and its Roche Diagnostics division, which maintains North American headquarters in Indianapolis.
Roche’s new capital investment plans announced Tuesday will expand certain existing Roche sites and add some new ones. Planned new sites include a gene therapy manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania, a glucose monitor manufacturing site in Indiana, and a new R&D center in Massachusetts. The research site will work in artificial intelligence and will also serve as a hub for cardiovascular, renal, and metabolism R&D. Last month, Roche announced it would establish this 30,000 square-foot site at Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus in Boston.
A new 900,000 square foot manufacturing center for weight loss medicines is also planned, but the location remains undisclosed. Roche joined the growing group of companies developing obesity medications with its $2.7 billion Carmot Therapeutics acquisition in 2023, which brought clinical-stage injectable and oral metabolic medicines. Last month, Roche reached a $1.65 billion deal to partner in the development of a Zealand Pharma obesity drug that goes after a different target than the currently available weight management medications. The deal terms make Roche responsible for manufacturing and supplying that engineered peptide, petrelintide.
Once the new and expanded manufacturing capacity comes online, Roche said the company will export more medicines from the U.S. than it imports into the country. But given the timelines for constructing pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure, that export surplus is years away. Roche said its diagnostics division already has a U.S. export surplus.
“Roche is a Swiss company with a strong heritage in more than 130 countries globally,” Roche Group CEO Thomas Schinecker said in a prepared statement. “Today’s announced investments underscore our long-standing commitment to research, development and manufacturing in the U.S.”
Roche’s manufacturing plans follow capital expenditure announcements from several of its big pharma peers. In February, Eli Lilly announced ongoing capital investments in Indiana and elsewhere in the U.S. would more than double to $50 billion.
In early March, Merck announced the opening of a $1 billion vaccine manufacturing site in Durham, North Carolina. Soon after, Johnson & Johnson said it would invest more than $55 billion in manufacturing and R&D infrastructure in the U.S. over the next four years. Earlier this month, Novartis announced plans to spend $23 billion to expand its U.S.-based manufacturing and R&D infrastructure over the next five years.
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