If you peer deep enough into space, you can see new star clusters being formed.
If you want to see a new industry cluster being formed, all you have to do is look here in Virginia.
While some of us were preoccupied this fall with who would win the election, who would be Virginia Tech’s new football coach and whether we really needed pumpkin spice in everything, something more long-lasting happened.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin presided over three major jobs announcements: a $3 billion investment and 500 jobs in Rockingham County, a $4.5 billion investment and 600 jobs in Albemarle County, a $5 billion investment and 650 jobs in Goochland County.
One thing tied them together: All were pharmaceutical jobs. Merck is expanding its existing operation in Rockingham, while AstraZeneca is locating in Albemarle and Eli Lilly in Goochland.
Another thing sort of ties them together. The latter two are in counties along Interstate 64; Rockingham is just one county away from that east-west interstate.
Together they trace a line to the Richmond-Petersburg metro, which has been promoting itself as a pharmaceutical center and was one of 31 places that the Biden administration targeted for “technology hub” funding.
What we’re seeing here is the birth of an industry cluster, and one that’s come about pretty quickly. Pharma Manufacturing, a trade journal for the industry, refers to “the rapid chain of events that sparked the Richmond-Petersburg pharma manufacturing cluster.” How this has happened offers an instructive lesson about how economies are shaped — and raises some intriguing questions about what will happen next, and what this means for the Roanoke and New River valleys, which have their own life sciences cluster.
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Youngkin became governor in early 2022, at the tail end of the pandemic, with a goal of “getting Virginia open for business.” His administration specifically looked at high-growth sectors that Virginia might be well-suited for, Youngkin said during an interview with Cardinal. One of those was pharmaceutical manufacturing.
“Coming out of the pandemic, we had an America that recognized we were not capable of manufacturing our own pharmaceuticals because India and China controlled 80% of the APIs that are the heart of any pharmaceutical manufacturing,” Youngkin said. (API stands for active pharmaceutical ingredients, the chemistry that makes drugs work.) “It was a huge national security risk. That led to a push to reshore a lot of pharmaceuticals. That combination really put a bull’s-eye on the pharmaceutical sector as one Virginia should pursue and win.”
What, though, put Virginia in a position that it could compete for pharmaceutical jobs?
While there are pharmaceutical companies in every state, Virginia has never been one of the top states for pharma jobs, although we’re close geographically to some that are. According to Manufacturer’s News, the top pharma state is New Jersey, with 49,109 workers in that sector — 12.9% of the nation’s total. California is a close second at 47,996 employees — 12.6% of the total. By contrast, IBIS World put the count in Virginia at just 1,871 workers.
That small number, though, masked some potentially big things that were starting to happen even before Youngkin took office. In 2021, the Richmond-based Phlow Corp. had won a $354 million federal contract to produce medicines for the Strategic National Stockpile. Phlow was an outgrowth of the Medicines for All Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University. The website Pharma Manufacturing attributes the beginning of Virginia’s pharma cluster to a $25 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017 to establish that institute. That project is led by Frank Gupton, chair of the Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering that’s part of the VCU College of Engineering. A retired pharmaceutical company executive, Gupton joined VCU in 2007.
Of course, that leads us to why there is a VCU College of Engineering. Much of the credit for that goes back to the early 1990s and Richmond businessman Bill Goodwin, who had offered to match a state investment to create such a school, and to then-Gov. George Allen, who took him up on the offer and backed the initiative. The 1990s seems a primitive time now in terms of technology, but Allen spent a lot of time promoting a “Silicon Dominion” and saw an engineering school in the state capital as part of that. VCU previously had a joint engineering program with Virginia Tech; in 1996, the VCU program became independent and while no one then could have foreseen how engineering would have led to pharmaceuticals, it did. Back then most of us thought of engineering as things with levers and gears; now we talk about life science engineering. “What I wanted was micro-engineering,” Allen said, “because engineering is so crucial to innovation but chemicals do matter. If we didn’t have the school of engineering, then Frank Gupton wouldn’t have his Medicines for All program there.” And without that, well, we may not have the building blocks that were already in place when the Youngkin administration began its push for pharmaceutical jobs in 2022. I’m broadbrushing a lot of important steps along the way to get us to where we are now.
“That gave us a good foundation but we needed to take our game to a whole new level if we wanted to compete with the likes of North Carolina and Maryland,” Youngkin said.
He said there were five key parts to making it to that next level.
The first was raising the state’s profile for research and development in the biosciences. It helped that there were things already happening that the state could leverage: the Virginia Tech-affiliated Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke, the launch of the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Virginia, the growth of the programs at VCU and the Biden administration’s designation of Richmond-Petersburg as a technology hub. All that, he said, “enabled us to quickly move to expand our university footprint.”
The second part, he said, was “we recognized we needed to build a talent pipeline.” VCU created a doctoral program in pharmaceutical engineering in 2019 — the only such Ph.D. program in the country — but “we didn’t really have the footprint we needed around the state,” Youngkin said, “so we pushed hard for capability within the community college system.” Both Brightpoint and J. Sergeant Reynolds community colleges in the Richmond area have added courses related to pharmaceutical manufacturing. So far, 250 students have enrolled. “What we’ve created in the space of two years in the greater Richmond and Petersburg area is you can start with high school dual-enrollment courses and go all the way to Ph.D.,” according to Elizabeth Creamer, vice president for workforce development with the community college system. Brightpoint is now working on adding an associate degree in pharmaceutical manufacturing, and talks are underway with Piedmont Community College in Albemarle County about starting programs there, Creamer says.
The third part, Youngkin said, was making sure Virginia had more and bigger ready-to-go sites. That’s been a constant theme through Youngkin’s term, and not just with pharmaceuticals. One reason Pittsylvania County lost out to Savannah, Georgia, for an 8,100-job Hyundai plant was that the Virginia site wasn’t as “shovel-ready” as the Georgia location was. The state has now appropriated about $500 million on site development. “That’s just a huge advantage today,” Youngkin said.
The fourth part, he said, was “we had to get Virginia’s business reputation to a place where companies saw us as easy to work with.” This involved streamlining regulations, something Republicans typically emphasize, but also the “Lab-to-Launch” program that aims to double the number of startups that spin out of university research in the state. The state also has appropriated $98 million to build incubators and wet labs across the state — including some in Roanoke.
The fifth part, Youngkin said, was “we finally needed to make sure that if we got a chance to talk to these companies that we could move quickly.” (You’ll see here how Youngkin thinks in terms of bullet points, much like the business executive he once was.) “We’ve got to work at the speed of business, not the speed of government,” he said.
Having laid out a plan, “we just went to work,” Youngkin said. “I got personally involved talking to CEOs of all the pharmaceutical companies.” He flew to Indianapolis to visit executives at Eli Lilly, he flew to … well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
“When it came time to actually recruit these companies, we were able to present an amazing resume and the ability to move incredibly quickly,” Youngkin said. Through 2022 and 2023, Virginia saw what Younkin called “some small but good wins” for Virginia — among them, a $6.1 million expansion of Engineered Biopharmaceuticals in Danville, a $27.8 million lab testing facility for Civica in Chesterfield County and a $97 million bioanalytical lab expansion for Thermo Fisher in the Richmond area. By early 2023, Pharmaceutical Processing World was taking notice: “Virginia is emerging as a hotspot for pharmaceutical manufacturing, attracting a growing number of industry players,” it reported, with 20 recent announcements totaling 1,400 jobs and $2.1 billion in investment.
“We had identified this sector as a macro-opportunity back in 2022 — it was always coming — but President Trump’s strong drive to reshore manufacturing, particularly APIs, has really accelerated it at an unprecedented rate,” Youngkin said. More neutral observers agree that Donald Trump’s policies have encouraged reshoring; the industry site Pharmaceutical Technology notes that Trump “has imposed 100% tariffs on branded pharmaceuticals unless a company is building manufacturing facilities in the U.S.” However, a recent paper in the Journal of Managed Care Specialty Pharmacies warned that Trump’s tariff policies will also disrupt supply chains so much that they “will likely increase costs, delay access to treatments, and trigger shortages, especially for critical generic medicines with already tenuous supply, such as antibiotics, intravenous fluids, sterile injectables (e.g., epinephrine, heparin), and infused cancer therapies.”
In June 2025, Youngkin led a trade mission to London and Paris. The trip was well-timed — just two days after Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had announced a new trade deal. One of Youngkin’s meetings was with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. “The CEO of AstraZeneca looked at me and said we want to go fast,” Youngkin said. The governor was able to assure him that Virginia would be able to move fast.
That was summer. By fall, Youngkin was able to announce that the company would make its largest single investment in a facility ever — and that facility would be in Virginia, specifically a property in Albemarle County that had been the beneficiary of a $9.7 million state grant for site preparation.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said in a statement: “We have found in Virginia an amazing team that moves at incredible speed.”
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Not only was the AstraZeneca investment the company’s biggest ever, so was Eli Lilly’s, according to Manufacturing Today. And the Merck investment was bigger than originally planned, Youngkin said.
“We now have a pharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem that has all the pieces of a place you want to be,” he said. “It’s a gravity pull. It’s a gravity pull for research dollars. It’s a gravity pull for investment dollars.”
Those are the kinds of things you might expect a proud governor to say, but industry observers are saying it, too. Pharmaceutical Technology hails Virginia as “an up-and-coming gem.” Pharma Manufacturing declares “Virginia is for pharma lovers.” Manufacturing Today, in reporting on the AstraZeneca announcement, says the facility “is more than a flagship project. It could anchor a growing ecosystem of pharmaceutical infrastructure, from research to packaging and logistics. With a high-profile company in place, suppliers and service firms may follow, reinforcing regional biotech development.”
So what does all this mean?
Youngkin sees Virginia creating its own Research Triangle of pharmaceutical companies, just on a wider geographical scale. “This is $12.5 billion of investment that will hire 3,000 people directly into the industry,” he said. “These are $125,000 jobs, and for every dollar they invest there’s between $4 and $6 of knock-on effect. This is an awesome industry to be leading in because of the economic impact across the state.” (While not every job at one of these facilities may be six figures, the Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the industry mean at $87,170 per year, with many jobs over $200,000.)
Pharmaceutical manufacturing is just one part of the larger life sciences sector, a sector the state has been intentionally growing since the 1990s. These pharma announcements — while big in their own right — send a signal, says John Newby, CEO of Virginia Bio, a statewide nonprofit trade association for life sciences. “It’s telling the world that Virginia has an ecosystem, not just in pharmaceuticals but all of biotechnology.” That’s where the Roanoke and New River valleys come in. “Although these three most recent announcements aren’t in Southwest, I can tell you that Southwest — the greater Roanoke-Blackburg-Lynchburg area — is going to play a big factor in these companies.” All of them will require supply chains and, ideally, spawn spinoffs.
“With that type of pharmaceutical engineering headquartered here, you’ll start to see additional growth around it,” says Sally Allain, the chief health sciences growth and innovation officer for Virginia Tech and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. “I think it elevates the commonwealth on a national scale when it comes to economic growth for the state. … It’s accelerating innovation in manufacturing, construction, robotics and automation” — all areas that Virginia Tech has expertise in, she says.
On the more narrow question of Virginia’s potential in the pharmaceutical industry, many of the same industry news sites that herald the state’s rise also call attention to its shortcomings. Pharmaceutical Technology quotes one pharmaceutical CEO as saying Virginia needs more talent than it currently has.
“To be successful as an ecosystem, you need talent, capital and technology,” Daniel O’Connell of Acumen Pharmaceuticals told the site. “Charlottesville and Richmond individually have elements of these three pillars, but not at scale and not in a sustainable way.”
Youngkin says Virginia is working on this. In a follow-up announcement to the three big pharma facilities, the governor said AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and Merck were putting up $120 million to create a Virginia Center for Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.
“One of the realities of the life sciences sector, particularly pharmaceutical manufacturing, is they don’t compete on manufacturing capability — they compete on the science,” Youngkin said. “So they collaborate incredibly well to come up with the best practices on manufacturing.”
He sees this center as a “state-of-the-art facility” where workers can be trained on the actual equipment used in the manufacturing plants. “We can be moving 2,000 people through the center every year,” he said. That will create a pipeline of qualified workers to staff these pharmaceutical plants — and attract others. “This will give companies confidence that everything they need will land at the same time,” Youngkin said. “They have to be able to bring on the people; they can’t wait on them to be ready.” This is all part of being able to move quickly to respond to industry needs, he said.
Five colleges — Hampton University, James Madison University, the University of Virginia, VCU and Virginia Tech — plus the community college system have signed on to be part of the center. Youngkin said his administration will be working out the details — including the key one of where it will be located — before he leaves office Jan. 17.
“We need to continue to execute; we can’t rest on our laurels,” he said. “We’ve got work to do to stay in this accelerated league. I’m confident we can do that, but the next administration is going to have to pick up this baton and run with it.”
For all of Youngkin’s emphasis on speed, the task of building a new economic sector, or even expanding an existing one, can sometimes be painfully slow.
The Merck expansion may not be completed until 2029, about the time our incoming governor, Abigail Spanberger, will be preparing to leave. The AstraZeneca plant in Albemarle and the Eli Lilly facility in Goochland may not be ready until 2030 or, in political terms, two governors from now.
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