Trump's Big Pharma Deals Drive CDMO Investments
By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma
It is a remarkable twist of industry manipulations, government suasion, and economics.
As reported, and I here utilize Global Data for some analysis, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) cut a Most Favored Nation (MFN) deal with the Trump administration that includes lowering prices – via TrumpRx.com; building out more manufacturing capacity in the U.S.; and (here’s the twist) investing in the U.S.-based facilities of a Japanese-owned CDMO.
Got all that? President Trump seems to be getting it all.
When the terrible tariff tantrum erupted last year, who would have thought pharma and contractors would be benefiting in such a way? As well as (I still say “potentially") helping out patients/consumers by appreciably driving down some drug prices.
J&J’s Prescription For Trump
Before we get to the outsourcing part of this, what we have here is New Jersey-based J&J announcing it will list some branded medicines on the U.S. government-created DTC platform, dubbed TrumpRx.gov.
J&J joins a pharma crowd who have cut deals with Trump of one kind or another, all involving big-dollar investment commitments in manufacturing facilities in the U.S.
According to Global Data, nine other deals have been made: Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, MSD, Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), Boehringer Ingelheim, Novartis and Sanofi.
So J&J becomes just the latest in this stream of companies signing drug-pricing deals with the U.S. government under the MFN umbrella.
For now, we'll refrain from questioning whether this actually is or should fall under the MFN rule, which in layman's terms fundamentally says (as co-opted by President Trump):
If you (drug company) give another country/market a better price than in the U.S. on a commercial drug, you must give us that price as well … or we tariff you (and more).”
Whatever we call this deal, the J&J announcement is packaged as a “voluntary agreement” with the Trump administration to offer (as of yet unspecified) medicines from its portfolio to lower prices for cash-paying patients, specifically via Trump’s (excuse me, the U.S. government’s) direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform.
What J&J gets out of it (besides some reprieve from further prodding) is, as Global Data reports, “immunity to the 100% tariffs on imported branded pharmaceuticals threatened by Trump back in April 2025.”
Global Data notes that Pfizer and AstraZeneca were the first to come to a drug pricing agreement with the White House (in October of last year), and these agreements “were set in stone after Trump called on 17 large pharma companies to cut drug prices on the U.S. market.
According to analysts at GlobalData, price reductions to branded medicines can only be sustained through a “decisive move away from dependence on imported medicines”, which has led to companies onshoring manufacturing capacity.
Which is our seque to what interests us directly.
Build Baby Build
J&J is building two new U.S.-based manufacturing facilities, adding capacity to “align with the U.S. government’s agenda and sustain price cuts within this key market.”
Those sites are in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and will manufacture “cell therapies and drug products … and fall under the company’s recent pledge of $55 billion to bolster its U.S. drug manufacturing capacity."
Moreover, J&J is plowing $2 billion into CDMO Fujifilm Biotechnologies’ new drug manufacturing facility in North Carolina. This facility will focus on large-scale cell-culture manufacturing of bulk drug substances.
Big Pharma investing in their own and CDMO facilities; if even purely from an aesthetic viewpoint, this is outstanding. It portrays an ecosystem of development and manufacturing efficiency, and a healthy codependence.
Global Data says these moves by J&J “fall under the general trend towards onshoring … as companies across the life sciences sector look to stay competitive on a global scale, while avoiding tariff exposure.”
And, they could have added, less diplomatically, sidestepping the wrath of Trump.
It appears that despite often unfortunate verbiage and questionable tactics, but also because of them, after years of blah blah blah, the pharma building out and CDMO building up on U.S. shores is in progress.
Billions and billions of dollars of progress.
Janet Beal, managing analyst for health economics and market access at GlobalData, noted that the industry is trending towards “balancing global competitiveness amid shifting policy and trade dynamics.”
That’s a nice way to put it.
All this may be especially nice for U.S.-based biotechs not wanting to go far and wide for development and manufacturing service.
Separate but tellingly, perhaps, J&J is investing in cell therapy (among other modalities it appears), and the Fujifilm investment is targeting large-scale cell-therapy manufacturing. This despite so much recent handwringing about a glut in cell-therapy-based capacity.
Wrapping up, J&J's adds to the announcements made throughout 2025 by the (global) CDMOs themselves of major investments in their U.S. facilities. (These also include the recent announcement that Samsung Biologics acquired Human Genome Sciences from GSK for $280 million, expanding its US manufacturing footprint at the Rockville, MD facility, by adding 60,000 liters of cGMP biologics capacity.)
Trump's arm twisting and our industry's calculated reactions are ushering in another year of interesting times.