North Carolina’s Research Triangle sees big investments despite NIH cuts

Like how birds tend to flock and fish tend to school, the biotech industry has a pattern of grouping together as well: from the established Boston/Cambridge academic area to the expanding life sciences region of Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.

That’s because biotech tends to cluster around universities and hospitals, while benefiting from pooling staff and cross collaboration. The Research Triangle in North Carolina is no exception.

The area had seven deals worth $60.2 million in 2025, according to data provided to Healthcare Brew by venture fund and advisory firm Rock Health. That’s after one $4.1 million deal in 2024 and eight deals worth $46.9 million in 2023.

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein also announced Jan. 9 that pharma giant Johnson & Johnson would create a second manufacturing facility in Wilson County, promising 500 new jobs and further establishing its presence within Research Triangle Park (RTP). The news followed an October 2024 announcement in which J&J pledged $2 billion to create a new manufacturing campus in the county and employ at least 420 people.

These are just two of the recent investments near RTP, as Fujifilm Biotechnologies and Amgen also made moves in nearby Holly Springs to the tune of $3.2 billion last September and $1 billion in January 2025, respectively.

The RTP’s continued expansion is indicative of two things: the pharma industry’s growth and the Trump administration’s push for reshoring. Still, cuts to federal research funding pose a challenge to the RTP, like other research areas, potentially contradicting the administration’s biotech goals, experts say.

“I’ve visited countries, in Europe and Asia mostly, where we said we’re from North Carolina and they didn’t know where that was. But they knew where RTP was,” Doug Edgeton, president and CEO of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center (NCBiotech), told us.

From 1959 to today

The RPT is certainly not new—it actually formed back in 1959 to bring together research from local research universities Duke University in Durham, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

“RTP has a rich history,” Edgeton said, and is among the top biotech research cities in the country.

Over the years, the RTP has grown to about 7,000 acres and includes at least 385 companies. The region saw $2+ billion in research funding in 2022, though NIH funding has been down in recent years—a trend that was only exacerbated by cuts encouraged by DOGE, President Trump’s unofficial advisory body that Elon Musk headed until May 2025.

“NIH grant funding was reduced in the past year across the country, not just in NC. Those grants go to researchers at labs in higher ed, the colleges and universities that drive innovation in science and often lead to commercial successes that benefit the health of Americans and people around the world,” Edgeton said.

He added NCBiotech has seen a 10x increase in funding requests for its small grant program as a result.

The economic success of the area has also grown the local population. Between 2020 and 2024, the Raleigh–Cary population grew by 10.2% to 1.6 million people, according to the US Census.

These recent investments—like the ones from J&J, Fujifilm Biotech, and Amgen—also mark the expansion of the areas around the RTP, not just within its 7,000 acres. Michael Haley, executive director of Wake County Economic Development, told Healthcare Brew these deals also show how the RTP has attracted larger investments in the last seven years or so.

“When you start looking around the region, you’re seeing very large-scale investments in the billions of dollars in life sciences,” he said, noting “the ramp-up in scale of both the complexity of the projects, the capital investment, [and] the types of jobs.”

Hub-bub

What sets the RTP apart from other major biotech hubs in the US, like top research metropolises Boston/Cambridge and the San Francisco Bay Area, Haley said, are some of the cost benefits of living in North Carolina.

Housing in Boston and San Francisco are among some of the highest in the US. Apartment rentals average $4,225 in Boston and $3,828 in San Francisco, according to Forbes, compared to $1,492 in Raleigh.

Meanwhile, North Carolina has pushed state money toward workforce development initiatives, Haley said, like a community college certificate program, job development investment grants, and life science tax exemptions.

There are also supply chain benefits, Haley added, like the number of contract manufacturers available and faster distribution. “Companies want that assurity [from the] supply chain, so being together helps,” he said.

Reshoring

It’s hard to have a conversation about new biotech manufacturing facilities in the US without referencing the Trump administration’s tariff initiatives and push for more drugmaking on US soil.

Some of these investments were already in place before this push, though companies like Eli Lilly and GSK have allocated billions of dollars to create new facilities in North Carolina, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

“We’ve been such a strong life science sector for so long that federal policy obviously impacts what that looks like,” Haley said, noting that continued funding for university research is important to the area. Still, he added, “there’s been some positive momentum” from reshoring efforts despite the “uncertainties.”

While grant cuts could pose challenges to the research itself, as it mostly targets higher education labs, Edgeton said, pharmaceuticals have made “careful calculations over several years” before deciding where to build.

“Those reductions in federal grant funding are not directly related to the biomanufacturing investments that drugmakers have announced in North Carolina and elsewhere around the country,” he said.