Roche Plans $50 Billion Investment to Expand US Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics
The investment will be done over five years and will include new, state-of-the-art R&D facilities as well as new or expanded manufacturing sites in multiple US states.
Sean K - stock.adobe.com
Editor's note: this story was originally published on PharmTech.com.
On April 22, 2025, Roche announced a new $50 billion investment into increasing its footprint in the United States between now and 2030, specifically for pharmaceutical manufacturing and diagnostics. The investment is expected to create more than 12,000 jobs, which includes approximately 6500 in construction and 1000 jobs at new and expanded facilities, according to a company press release (1).
The plans that have been announced for those facilities cover eight states in the US, although a location has yet to be disclosed for a proposed 900,000-square-foot manufacturing center to support Roche’s expanding portfolio of next-generation weight loss medicines (1). Sites in California, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Oregon will receive expanded and upgraded manufacturing capabilities for innovative medicines and diagnostics; expansion and upgrading of existing pharmaceutical and diagnostics R&D centers in Arizona, California, and Indiana will also be part of the investment.
Additionally, in Indiana, there are plans to build a new manufacturing facility for continuous glucose monitoring. A state-of-the-art gene therapy manufacturing facility will be built in Pennsylvania, and a new R&D center is planned in Massachusetts, where Roche said cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) research would be conducted, with the facility serving as a hub for the company’s new R&D efforts in the cardiovascular, renal, and metabolism spaces (1).
“Roche is a Swiss company with a strong heritage in more than 130 countries globally. Today’s announced investments underscore our long-standing commitment to research, development, and manufacturing in the US,” Thomas Schinecker, Roche Group CEO, said in the press release (1). “We are proud of our 110-year legacy in the United States which has been a key driver for jobs, innovation, and the creation of intellectual property in the US, across both our Pharmaceutical and Diagnostics divisions. Our investments of $50 billion over the next five years will lay the foundation for our next era of innovation and growth, benefiting patients in the US and around the world.”
Roche said that when the new and expanded manufacturing capacity all comes online, the company will be exporting more medicines from the US than it imports; its diagnostics division already has an export surplus from the US, according to the press release (1). That may be especially relevant given the uncertainty surrounding tariffs being imposed by the US, and reciprocation from other countries, which were hot topics of discussion at INTERPHEX 2025 in New York City from April 1–3.
“We have seen a few companies that are our customers that are reaching out to look at automated manufacturing stateside, where they had [previously] been producing the parts overseas,” Peter Sarvey, head of sales at Automation NTH, told the PharmTech Group at the conference (2). “So I think that’s the end result, and the end goal, I’d have to imagine, is to bring that manufacturing back [to the US].”
Some of Roche’s other activity thus far in 2025 was covered in the March 5 episode of Pharmaceutical Technology®’s “Behind the Headlines” series. In that discussion, industry experts included Roche’s unveiling of a new class of next-generation sequencing with its novel sequencing by expansion technology, as part of a larger conversation about new genomics tools (3,4).
Prior to the announcement of the $50 billion investment, Roche’s US footprint included more than 25,000 company employees at 15 R&D centers and 13 manufacturing sites (1).
References
1. Roche. Roche to Invest USD 50 Billion in Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics in the United States over the Next Five Years. Press Release. April 22, 2025.
2. Lavery, P. Tariff Pause Reinforces Uncertainty Among Biopharma Professionals. BioPharmInternational.com, April 10, 2025.
3. Spivey, C. Behind the Headlines Episode 12–Cell and Gene Therapies, New Genomics Tools, and Recent Partnerships. PharmTech.com, March 5, 2025.
4. Roche. Roche Unveils a New Class of Next-Generation Sequencing with its Novel Sequencing by Expansion Technology. Press Release. Feb. 19, 2025.
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