A strong pharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem has developed around the Virginia cities of Richmond and Petersburg, anchored by the Alliance for Building Better Medicine.

A lot changed in Virginia’s life sciences industry in the space of about a month last fall. Between Sept. 16 and Oct. 20, biopharmaceutical manufacturing giants Eli Lilly and Company, AstraZeneca, and Merck & Co. announced major projects in the Commonwealth totaling $12.5 billion of capital investment and 1,750 direct jobs. Eleven days after the Merck announcement, the three companies committed $120 million of private investment toward developing the Virginia Center for Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, a workforce training partnership with several institutes of higher education in the Commonwealth.

Those announcements came one after another, with unprecedented speed — AstraZeneca needed just 33 days to decide that Albemarle County was the right place for its facility focused on the company’s weight management and metabolic portfolio.

But they resulted from nearly a decade of strategic, targeted investments in the biopharma manufacturing space that drove Virginia to the forefront in the factors companies depend on: a talented, sustainable workforce, project-ready sites to accelerate development, and research and development with proven results.

One foundational investment came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation nearly a decade ago, which was used to launch the Medicines for All Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University. That group’s partnership with Civica Rx to manufacture affordable insulin in Petersburg served as an early proof of concept for the kinds of facilities the Commonwealth would land in 2025.

In 2020, a Richmond-Petersburg coalition launched the Alliance for Building Better Medicine, devoted to creating a reliable supply of safe, high-quality affordable medicines. A crucial supply chain boost is coming with a planned memorandum of understanding to create a pharmaceutical super-corridor between Washington Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia and Brussels Airport in Belgium, linking an existing pharma manufacturing powerhouse in Europe with the up-and-coming one in Virginia.

This issue dives into those factors and many others that have driven Virginia to the forefront of the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry. We hope you enjoy this chronicle of the strategic moves and investments that have positioned the Commonwealth for its current — and future — success.

Jason El Koubi

President & CEO

Virginia Economic Development Partnership