Merck opens $1 billion addition in north Durham to boost production of popular vaccine
The drugmaker Merck announced it has opened a $1 billion vaccine manufacturing facility in north Durham, a 225,000-square-foot addition to the company’s existing campus off Old Oxford Road.
This new plant will manufacture the HPV vaccines Gardasil and Gardasil 9, Merck told The News & Observer on Monday, while the site as a whole continues to produce vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox, among other illnesses.
Six years ago, the New Jersey company signed incentive deals with North Carolina and local governments to expand its operations in Durham and Wilson County. As of 2022, the company had already met or exceeded its incentive requirements by creating 353 jobs and retaining 1,247 positions between its two campuses, state commerce records provided to The N&O show.
Merck has been in north Durham since 2004. Last year, its Bull City campus produced 70.7 million doses, a figure the company expects to rise.
“That number will continue to increase as we receive additional regulator approvals,” a spokesperson said in an email. The spokesperson said Durham is the third Merck site to produce Gardasil and Gardasil 9, vaccines which generated just shy of $8.6 billion in 2024.
Merck says it now employs more than 1,000 workers in Durham. According to its annual financial reports, the pharmaceutical giant has increased its U.S. workforce overall from 25,400 in 2019 to 31,000 entering this year. It currently is the world’s 46th-largest public company, by market capitalization, behind fellow drugmakers Johnson & Johnson and Novo Nordisk but bigger than Amgen and Pfizer.
Each of these pharma companies has in recent years committed to expand in North Carolina as drug production boosts economic growth in the Triangle and Eastern North Carolina.
The sector supports more than 25,000 jobs, the third most of any state, according to a January report commissioned by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
“North Carolina has really become a global leader in the biopharmaceutical manufacturing space,” Bill Bullock, senior vice president of economic and statewide development at NC Biotech, told The N&O. “That’s built on a lot of investment, primarily in workforce, as well as a fairly positive business climate here.”
On Tuesday, Merck said it expects to invest $8 billion more in its U.S. facilities by 2028.
“Expanding our state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Durham marks a significant milestone in our efforts to strengthen our production and manufacturing capabilities in the U.S.,” Sanat Chattopadhyay, president of Merck manufacturing division, said in a statement.
This story was originally published March 11, 2025 at 6:45 AM with the headline "Merck opens $1 billion addition in north Durham to boost production of popular vaccine."
