Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind the blockbuster obesity and diabetes drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, recently announced plans to expand its manufacturing operations in Clayton with a $4.1 billion investment into a new 1.4 million-square-foot facility.
A Johnston County economic development official is describing it as the biggest life science investment in North Carolina, possibly the United States.
Novo Nordisk already employs 2,500 people in Clayton across its three existing facilities, the first of which was built in 1993.
The new addition will come online sometime between 2027 and 2029, and create an additional 1,000 jobs.
“These jobs will be everything from high-level management, middle management, highly-skilled scientists, chemists, engineers, people that will do product testing, to the folks that are putting the pens into the boxes and getting the labels on them so they can be delivered to patients,” Jay Kuykendall , project vice president of Novo Nordisk’s Clayton expansion, told Carolina Public Press .
The construction project, which at its peak next summer will employ 2,000 people, is already underway.
“We’re at about 300 on site, and to this point, it’s almost 100% North Carolina people out there,” Kuykendall said.
“I would think it’s safe to say the majority of the folks that will be working (on the construction) are from North Carolina. But it depends on the availability of labor and people when we do our bidding process for those jobs.”
Novo Nordisk’s emphasis on employing locals extends beyond the construction phase. The company partners with high schools and community colleges in the area on a BioWork certification that allows high school graduates to get entry-level jobs at their manufacturing facilities.
This is good news for a state whose recent unemployment numbers have begun trending in the wrong direction: the unemployment rate increased in 95 of North Carolina’s counties in May. For now, the overall jobless rate does remain low in Johnston County, at 3.2%.
“They were actually contemplating building this facility over in Ireland,” Chris Johnson , economic development director of Johnston County, told CPP.
“So we are very fortunate to lay claim to the largest investment in a life science project not only in North Carolina, but possibly in the United States. When you add on an additional 1,000 jobs at Novo (Nordisk), it becomes a huge regional employment center. People come from 25 neighboring counties to work there now.”
Novo Nordisk drug controversy
This investment comes at a time when President Joe Biden is calling out Novo Nordisk for the high costs of Ozempic and Wegovy during his reelection campaign. Biden collaborated with Sen. Bernie Sanders , I-Vermont, on an opinion column in USAToday, in which they accused the company of “price gouging” and “corporate greed.”
“In 2023, for example, Novo Nordisk made over $12 billion in profits , in part by charging Americans over $1,000 a month for a prescription drug that can be profitably manufactured for less than $5,” Biden wrote.
The extremely high demand for Ozempic — doctors wrote 9 million prescriptions in the US in the final three months of 2022 alone — has resulted in extreme shortages that persist even now.
“This (new facility in Clayton) is not going to be an answer to the immediate demand needs for our products,” Novo Nordisk spokesperson Stacy Beard told CPP.
Although the facility’s stated purpose is the manufacturing of “treatments for obesity and other chronic diseases,” Novo Nordisk cannot confirm whether the new facility will manufacture Ozempic specifically, in part because the company is not sure how things will evolve by the end of the decade.
“It’s being built in a way that’s super-flexible, to be able to have production lines that could change products based on the needs of the patients at that time,” Beard said.
“Everyone’s forecasting that obesity drugs, in general, and especially self-injectables (like Wegovy or Ozempic), are going to grow significantly by 2030,” Matthew Metzgar , a economics professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte who researches the economics of obesity, told CPP. “You see numbers like $100 billion, $150 billion market.”
“But if you look back historically, on other obesity drugs, there’s been a lot of false starts, and a lot of drugs that got pulled,” said Metzgar, referencing drugs like Fen-phen, Meridia and Lorcaserin, whose long-term side effects, which included heart attack and cancer, were unknown at the time of their FDA approval.
“But economically, I still think this investment is a very safe bet.”
Metzgar also pointed out that the popularity and effectiveness of Ozempic is changing the way doctors view obesity itself.
“Diet and exercise has been recommended for forever, but for whatever reason, that hasn’t worked — in the sense that obesity rates never went down,” Metzgar said. “Now, doctors are looking at it more now as a disease that, like any disease, can be treated with medicine.”
Editor’s note: The current Novo Nordisk facilities in Johnston County employ about 2,500 people across three sites. Mistaken numbers appeared in the article initially due to incorrect information that CPP received. This has since been corrected.
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