Roche to spend $550M building Indianapolis HQ into CGM production hub

Roche plans to invest as much as $550 million in its Indianapolis diagnostics campus during the next five years, with plans to build it into a U.S. manufacturing and distribution hub for its wearable diabetes blood sugar sensors.

The announced expansion follows an April commitment from the Swiss pharma to spend $50 billion on developing U.S. facilities for research, development and production by 2030—including in Indiana as well as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California and elsewhere, with a projection of 1,000 total new hires.

Indianapolis currently serves as the international home of its diagnostics division, with R&D laboratories, an administrative headquarters and manufacturing lines that produce about 5.2 billion of the company’s Accu-Chek diabetes test strips per year.

In a statement, Roche said the location’s planned expansion will “generate hundreds of highly-skilled manufacturing jobs and thousands of construction jobs” as the company looks to avoid new tariffs on imports from the Trump administration.

At the same time, the company announced a $700 million project to build a new pharmaceutical fill-and-finish plant for its Genentech unit near Raleigh, North Carolina, aimed at supporting its plans to provide next-generation obesity drugs.

Outside the U.S., earlier this month Roche pledged nearly $300 million to spin up a biomanufacturing hub in Shanghai to produce the eye medication Vabysmo for the Chinese market.

Roche unveiled its Accu-Chek SmartGuide continuous glucose monitor, equipped with artificial-intelligence-powered prediction software, early last year. The 14-day system received European approval in July 2024 for people with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes.

Across the U.S., Roche and Genentech currently count more than 25,000 employees across 15 R&D centers and 13 manufacturing sites.

SOURCE: Fierce Biotech