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A year after Eli Lilly and Co. put Greater Richmond on the national map with a $5 billion manufacturing announcement, the region’s advanced pharmaceutical cluster is still adding milestones, most of them driven by companies and institutions already rooted in the City of Richmond and surrounding counties of Henrico, Hanover, and Chesterfield.
Lilly’s September 2025 announcement remains the anchor. The facility, expected to create 650 high-wage jobs and roughly 1,800 construction jobs, will be the company’s first dedicated, fully integrated site for active pharmaceutical ingredients and drug products treating cancer, autoimmune conditions, and other advanced therapies. Lilly CEO Dave Ricks said the company fielded more than 400 proposals from 46 states before choosing the region, citing local workforce potential, incentives, utility access and favorable zoning. The plant is the first of four domestic facilities that Lilly plans to open as part of a $50 billion reshoring commitment.
Within weeks, Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Merck built on that momentum with a $120 million commitment to the Virginia Center for Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, a workforce training program developed with the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation and multiple Virginia colleges and universities. The center aims to graduate 2,000 to 2,500 Virginians annually with a stackable credential or degree, from technician certifications through advanced degrees.
That kind of talent pipeline matters because the region’s pharma cluster didn’t start with Lilly. It traces to 2020, when private companies, elected officials, economic development organizations, and university researchers began meeting to discuss what it would take to reshore pharmaceutical manufacturing. That effort became the Alliance for Building Better Medicine, anchored by Frank Gupton’s, PhD, Medicines for All Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) College of Engineering, which drew more than $60 million from the Gates Foundation to develop low-cost AIDS drugs and inspired the continuous-manufacturing approach behind Richmond-based Phlow Corp.
The Alliance’s newest milestone landed in July, when it secured $15.9 million from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the first direct federal funding for Virginia’s Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Tech Hub since its 2023 designation. The money will be used to launch an “end-to-end” commercialization project in which Phlow and fellow Richmond company Occam Systems will manufacture chemical building blocks and active ingredients for ketamine, midazolam, norepinephrine, and succinylcholine, drugs used in emergency, anesthesia and critical care settings. Civica Rx, a nonprofit drugmaker, will then produce the finished medicines at its nearby plant.
Alliance chairman Robby Demeria called initiative the long-sought step toward a fully domestic supply chain for essential medicines: “These are low-margin medications, but wildly important to sustaining health and conquering disease here in the U.S.”
Greater Richmond’s research infrastructure grew alongside it. In July, Activation Capital, which operates the Virginia Bio+Tech Park in downtown Richmond, announced a roughly 10,500-square-foot addition built through a lease with VCU. The addition will bring 13 new wet labs, including a clean room, to the 10 already operating there, more than doubling the center’s lab capacity. The added space will support Activation Capital’s Basecamp, Pathfinder, Frontier BioHealth, and Pioneer Connect programs, which help life sciences entrepreneurs move from early concept and company formation to investor readiness and commercial production.
Existing employers have expanded alongside the newcomers. Consumer health company Haleon invested $54 million to upgrade its Richmond facility and launched a paid internship pipeline with VCU. Anton Paar, the Austrian precision-instrument maker, continues building out its U.S. headquarters in Hanover County. In Chesterfield, Civica broke ground on a 50,000-square-foot R&D and quality-testing lab expected to grow to 350 local employees, supporting the company’s broader regional manufacturing footprint.
Together, the announcements reflect a strategy that regional leaders have pursued since 2020: build the manufacturing capacity, the research space, and the trained workforce at the same time, rather than waiting for one to follow the other. The region’s Tech Hub designation from the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2023 gave that strategy federal recognition. The steady run of investment since, from Lilly’s $5 billion plant to a 10,500-square-foot lab expansion in downtown Richmond, suggests the region intends to keep building on it.
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