Small and large drugmakers alike have made big, proactive moves to secure the production capacity that will be vital to serving the weight loss market.
The scale of the obesity opportunity is transforming early-phase drug development priorities. Targeting a condition that affects more than a billion people globally, the companies seeking to challenge Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk for the weight loss market are deviating from conventional thinking about the timing and scale of investments in manufacturing capacity.
A series of deals and investments in 2024 and 2025 showed the shift in thinking. Metsera and Viking Therapeutics made big moves to secure obesity drug production capacity after reporting Phase I and II data, respectively. This week, Metsera saw all its efforts pay off with Pfizer dropping nearly $5 billion to buy the whole company—and Leerink Partners analysts pointed to manufacturing cost advantages related to the company’s peptide platform “dramatically reducing API requirements relative to competing drugs.” Larger biotechs and pharmas have acted on the manufacturing front too, with Amgen and Roche collectively investing more than $2 billion in plants that will handle products including obesity drugs still in mid-stage development.
The decisions to invest while still in early or even mid-stage trials set the companies apart from biotechs that have won approvals in recent years for other types of drugs. For example, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals entered into a commercial supply agreement for its metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis drug Rezdiffra between publishing Phase III data and winning FDA approval. Similarly, BridgeBio Pharma first disclosed long-term supply agreements for cardiomyopathy drug Attruby in its annual report for 2023, the year it reported Phase III data.
Metsera CEO Whit Bernard explained why he has focused on manufacturing. “It’s unbelievably important as we get back into prevalent disease and we’re thinking about things like injectable peptides.” Manufacturing, he told BioSpace, is “existential. It’s as important as clinical development. . . . That’s why we focused on it as early as we did.”
Metsera struck a deal last year with the generics manufacturer Amneal Pharmaceuticals while its lead program was still in Phase I. Amneal is building two manufacturing facilities in India, one for peptide synthesis and one for sterile fill-finish, at a cost of $150 million to $200 million over four to five years. The deal made Amneal Metsera’s preferred supply partner for developed markets.
Viking has taken a different approach to securing the scale needed to compete in obesity, entering into an agreement with CordenPharma to access dedicated manufacturing capacity after seeing Phase II data. The capacity will annually support the supply of multiple tons of Viking’s active ingredient, 100 million autoinjectors and 100 million vials and syringes.
The Metsera and Viking agreements show that some biotechs are trying to rise to the challenge laid down by incumbents. While Lilly has sought to frame manufacturing as a barrier to entry, Bernard argued that Metsera’s mix of partnering to access drug production capacity and peptide engineering to lower the effective dose will make it competitive.
“Do you need to be a Big Pharma? No, partner with a generics player. They deliver at a greater scale than large pharma all day long,” he said. “Innovate fundamentally at the peptide level to make it more scalable than, frankly, the peptides Lilly has, so that for every 10 factories Lilly builds, we only need to build one.”
Big Companies Make Big Bets
The obesity market is big enough to require even companies with large manufacturing networks to invest in their infrastructure. In December 2024, Amgen unveiled a $1 billion investment in a drug substance facility in North Carolina, adding to an existing $550 million commitment to the site. Amgen reported Phase II data on obesity candidate MariTide days before outlining its production plans, and Justin Claeys, VP of investor relations at Amgen, said at a TD Cowen event in March that MariTide is a driver of the expansion.
As with Metsera, Amgen’s plan for how to meet the scale demands of the obesity market goes beyond the brute force approach of opening and expanding facilities, as CFO Peter Griffith explained at a Goldman Sachs event in June.
“We continue to be very focused on yield management, too, and the science of manufacturing. Because if we can improve the yield, then that means it’s less bricks, mortar and dirt that we have to use. We can utilize that in terms of our volume growth,” Griffith said.
Roche, too, is investing in North Carolina to support its obesity ambitions, committing more than $700 million to build a facility for making metabolic medicines. Roche made the commitment before seeing Phase II data on CT-388, its dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist. A spokesperson for Roche told BioSpace that the investment in the facility, plus a $550 million outlay on a continuous glucose monitoring plant, “marks substantial progress in expanding access to holistic care for patients with obesity and diabetes.”
Roche plans to break ground on the manufacturing site at the end of August, Teresa Graham, CEO of the pharmaceuticals division, said on an earnings call in July. Graham discussed the facility after a Morgan Stanley analyst asked how confident Roche is in its ability to compete with Lilly and Novo, given that “GLP-1 pricing may be coming down more sharply and quickly than previously anticipated.”
The Roche executive said the new facility is a high-volume, high-throughput plant “that is very specifically designed to support our obesity portfolio.” Roche is “very aware of the likely pricing dynamics in the space,” Graham said, and “our plans are fully geared in order to compete in that arena.”
Boehringer Ingelheim is also targeting the space and, in survodutide, has one of the more advanced assets in the next wave of candidates. The company is running multiple Phase III trials in people with obesity to evaluate the effect of its long-acting glucagon/GLP-1 receptor agonist on weight and comorbidities. Many of the studies have completion dates ranging from late 2025 to mid-2026, per ClinicalTrials.gov.
Asked about Boehringer’s manufacturing plans, a spokesperson for the company told BioSpace that “it is too early for us to elaborate since the asset is still in Phase III trials.” Boehringer is “continuously investing in the development and transformation of production capacities and technologies, as well as in strategic cooperations with external manufacturers,” the spokesperson said.
