GLP‑1s: manufacturing bulk‑up key focus amid drug class’s ongoing growth explosion

Market demand for glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1s) for obesity treatment show no signs of slowing down, reflecting an ongoing need for the space’s frontrunners to pay close attention to their manufacturing provision for the drug class.

For Eli Lilly and Novo, the weight loss drug space’s leading players, their injectable weight-loss drugs, Zepbound (tirzepatide) and Wegovy (semaglutide), respectively, are continuing to generate strong revenues. Lilly recently reported year-over-year (YoY) growth of 48% in Q2, with Zepbound growing 44% to $4.9bn. Novo posted more mixed results in Q2 yet growth for the Danish pharma’s weight-loss offering also remains strong.

The weight-loss drugs’ ongoing demand reflects a need for Lilly and Novo to pay close attention to their manufacturing provision. For Lilly, the ongoing onshoring push as mandated by the Trump administration has led the Indiana-headquartered pharma to pledge large investments towards the development of additional active pharmaceutical product (API) facilities across the US.

Meanwhile, Lilly also invested $3bn into a new Dutch facility in November 2025. The site, which will produce orforglipron, the company’s inaugural oral small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist, preceded the publication of Lilly’s 2025 Report in February 2026, revealing that it had amassed a $1.5bn pre-launch inventory, much of which was in relation to orforglipron, the active ingredient in its oral GLP-1 pill, Foundayo.

Coming before the drug was even approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which occurred in April 2026, Lilly began stockpiling the small molecule in order to avoid a repeat of the shortages experienced during Zepbound’s rollout in 2022.

Lilly and Novo now both have FDA approval for an oral GLP-1 – a situation that adds further considerations for the companies regarding the manufacture of these oral formulations alongside their more established injectable GLP-1s.

To learn more about the manufacturing dynamics under consideration in the GLP-1 space as the drug class continues to grow and diversify, Pharmaceutical Technology spoke with Dominic Tyer, senior editor at GlobalData Healthcare, to gain insight into the current challenges and considerations GLP-1s’ demand is prompting for those involved in the space.

Dominic Tyer: GLP-1s have had massive runaway success in the last four- to-five years, and that's expected to increase as oral formulations make their mark. The addition of oral formulations will clearly add a very important element into the mix of what's already a highly dynamic market.

In terms of pharma manufacturing, a lot of it's to do with how pharma companies and their outsourcing partners respond to the explosive demand that we're seeing. It's all very well looking at forecasts for sales but meeting that demand requires a lot of thought in terms of capacity planning.

And we've already seen some of the challenges that pharma companies have in terms of trying to balance that capacity, with supply constraints seen along the way. Looking at Eli Lilly and Novo, they've each pursued slightly different routes regarding their approach towards ensuring they have enough capacity to meet demand.

For Novo, it's taken more of a ‘buying in capacity’ approach through the $16.5bn acquisition of contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) Catalent as completed in December 2024 – an action that bolted on a huge amount of additional capacity for the Danish pharma. And while those working in this space can't realistically take CDMOs out of the mix entirely, for Lilly, they're following more of a building out in-house capacity approach, while still leaning on outsourcing partners.

Dominic Tyer: ​​​​​​​Onshoring is upending a lot of traditional assumptions around how pharma manufacturing fits together, and how these incredibly complex globally integrated supply chains can work. In terms of building out new capacity, when talking about a new greenfield or brownfield site, it is indeed likely to take at least four years to have up and running, and perhaps slightly longer to have it fully operational, so it's very much looking into the future.

Arguably, it gives pharma companies an opportunity to look at where they want to be investing for that 5-10 and even to a 10-20-year scale, perhaps prompting them to retool their investments and manufacturing footprints as a result.

Regarding GLP-1s, the shift is more nuanced. Certainly, a company like Lilly is increasing its investment into US-based facilities, but it's also increasing investment into facilities around the world, and evidently now looking to have a more geographically diverse supply chain to mitigate geopolitical shocks both to manufacturing and the supply chain.

Within GLP-1s, we are seeing manufacturers looking to build out bases in a number of local hubs, too, so that they are less likely to be as affected by these shocks as they might have been in the past.

Meanwhile, stockpiling is always going to be a big consideration regarding capacity, and we need only look at Lilly’s stockpiling of its oral GLP-1 in advance of its first approvals to get a sense of how important this factor is in relation to the anticipated and ongoing demand for weight-loss drugs in general. And, to some extent, stockpiling of product should give manufacturers a buffer when it comes to any potential supply chain shocks due to geopolitical dynamics we are witnessing in the world today.

Dominic Tyer: As the GLP-1 space gets more crowded, companies will need to look at ways that they can differentiate themselves. This may involve looking at what are other types of candidates, in either diabetes, but more likely the obesity space, they can develop to start targeting some of the side effects or issues with existing GLP-1s. And this move can already be seen in terms of some of the pipeline M&A deals or acquisitions that big pharma companies are making.