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

Roche Indianapolis
Indianapolis currently serves as the international home of Roche's diagnostics division, with manufacturing lines that produce about 5.2 billion diabetes test strips per year. The company said the expansion will bring hundreds of jobs plus thousands more in construction. (Roche)

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.