Infrastructure and location have helped make Holly Springs a future hub for obesity drug production, with Amgen and Roche planning to manufacture GLP-1 therapies there to compete in the growing market.
A North Carolina town with around 50,000 residents has emerged as a vital launchpad for two planned attacks on the obesity market. Amgen and Roche are pouring more than $3.5 billion into Holly Springs to make medicines that could challenge Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk for the market. The quick-fire investments are built on a 20-year campaign to create an attractive environment for drugmakers.
Novartis put Holly Springs on the biopharma map when it unveiled plans to build a vaccine manufacturing plant in the town in 2006. Holly Springs’ support for the facility, which is now run by CSL Seqirus, led to the town being overextended financially and facing significant gaps in meeting Novartis’ demands for cleared land, a new road, water and sewer service and a fire truck. Yet the project set the stage for a series of industry commitments, including a recent obesity-focused investment surge.
Amgen broke ground on a $550 million drug substance production plant in the town in 2022. The biotech committed a further $1 billion in late 2024 as the magnitude of the opportunity open to its obesity drug candidate MariTide became clear.
Roche’s Genentech was even quicker to double down on Holly Springs, committing $700 million in May 2025 and adding another $1.3 billion to its plan in January 2026. Roche’s plant will manufacture obesity drug candidates, including its dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist CT-388.
Amgen is running seven Phase 3 trials of MariTide with primary completion dates in 2027 and 2028. The biotech opened its first Holly Springs plant last year and expects to grow headcount across the site to 725 by 2032 as the second facility comes online and scales up.
Roche reported Phase 2 data on CT-388 in January, positioning the company to start two Phase 3 trials in the first quarter of this year. The Swiss drugmaker expects its Holly Springs facility to be operational in 2029.
Michael Haley, executive director of Wake County Economic Development, explained how decisions officials in Holly Springs made years ago put the town in the running when Amgen and Roche began looking for sites to support their obesity ambitions.
“They started planning to be a life science manufacturing hub 15, 20 years ago. They focused on very traditional economic development structures,” Haley told BioSpace. Those included a business park, greenfield sites, a graywater system and water and wastewater infrastructure.
Accessing Talent
Such infrastructure investments helped Holly Springs to capitalize on other advantages it offers. It’s located around 20 miles from Raleigh, North Carolina, which site selection specialist Global Location Strategies (GLS) ranked as the best place in the U.S. to build a biologics production plant.
GLS CEO Didi Caldwell told BioSpace that the Raleigh-Cary metro area, which includes Holly Springs, topped the rankings because of the strength of its biopharma manufacturing workforce and strong pipeline of talent from universities in the area. The Durham–Chapel Hill metro area, which is next to Raleigh-Cary, ranked third on GLS’ list.
“Durham-Chapel Hill is number one for biologic specialization,” Caldwell said. “They have this deep, deep heritage of biotech, pharma and regulated manufacturing, so they have an exceptional concentration of bioprocessing and quality assurance roles.”
The availability of seasoned professionals and new trainees, plus the ability to attract people from other parts of the country and world, is critical because access to talent is a problem nationally. Caldwell said there are 60,000 vacancies in the pharma industry, adding that “you can build more plants, but if you cannot staff them you’re not going to be able to operate them.”
Managing Growth Pressures
Demand for talent in Holly Springs is increasing, with Amgen creating 370 jobs and Roche planning to employ more than 500 people at its site. Haley expressed confidence that the region can fill the new roles, pointing to the tens of thousands of people who annually graduate from local universities and community colleges or relocate to the region.
“Fifteen years ago, we had 35,000 life science employees and people would ask, ‘Can we maintain our talent advantage?’ Now we have over 75,000 people,” Haley said. “We met the challenges through the years and we feel very confident . . . that we can continue to meet the needs of our existing companies.”
As well as nurturing the talent to staff the sites, the region needs to ensure infrastructure including water and energy supply can cope with the rising demand. Holly Springs invested ahead of the local surge in obesity drug manufacturing, but meeting the needs of a growing manufacturing footprint and population, which increased 10% from 2020 to 2024 in the Raleigh metro area, is an ongoing challenge.
Amid a data center boom, manufacturing facilities are part of a broader set of sites clamoring for water and energy. A company has applied to build a 300-megawatt data center about 10 miles from Holly Springs, sparking pushback from residents concerned about energy and water consumption. Similar situations are playing out across North Carolina as companies apply to build data centers.
Haley said there is “pressure on infrastructure, just because of the sheer growth that we’re seeing” and the complexity of projects has changed dramatically in the past 5 to 10 years, with facilities requiring more capacity for water, wastewater and power. Officials have responded to the changes.
“It’s hard to play catch-up when you’re dealing with infrastructure. You’re always a little behind the eight ball,” Haley said. “For us, the solution is to have as much foresight as possible so that our utility providers are calculating potential demand, putting that into their own models and acting accordingly when they’re developing the infrastructure that they need.”
