Thomas Seewoester, Vice President Site Operations and Site Head at Amgen Manufacturing Limited, LLC, has overseen Puerto Rico's most significant manufacturing campus for three years, building on more than three decades of Amgen presence and USD six billion in cumulative investment. Seewoester discusses the rationale behind a further USD one billion reinvestment, what makes Puerto Rico a genuinely distinctive manufacturing hub, its remaining challenges, and the reshoring opportunity ahead.
Amgen has been in Puerto Rico for over 30 years. Can you give us a sense of how the Juncos site has evolved, and what it represents within Amgen’s global manufacturing network today?
Amgen’s history in Puerto Rico goes back more than three decades, and in many ways the evolution of our Juncos site reflects the growth of Amgen itself and of the broader biopharma industry on the island. We established our presence in the early 1990s, at a time when Amgen was transitioning from a young biotech into an organization capable of manufacturing biologic medicines at commercial scale – owned by us, not through a contract manufacturing organisation. What began as a very small single-building operation focused primarily on formulation and fill grew significantly as our portfolio expanded rapidly through the mid to late 1990s. Juncos became the site where Amgen’s core commercial manufacturing would reside.
The key turning point came in the early 2000s, when Amgen made a very substantial investment to expand from one building on 200 acres into what we have today – a full campus with bio-manufacturing capacity, analytical laboratories, packaging, warehousing, and distribution. That transformed a single plant into a highly integrated end-to-end manufacturing operation. Over the years, total investment has reached approximately USD six billion, reflecting a long-term commitment to the site, its capabilities, and its people. Today, Juncos is Amgen’s largest manufacturing site and one of the most advanced biomanufacturing facilities in the world. We operate around the clock, and the medicines produced here reach patients in more than 60 countries. This is a globally focused operation.
What I think is most important about that history is that we have never remained static. For more than 30 years, we have continued to invest, introduce new technologies, and develop deep technical expertise within our workforce that we now deploy across the wider Amgen network. Our history also speaks to resilience. Puerto Rico has faced significant challenges over the years, including Hurricane Maria, which went directly over our campus. Within ten days, we were back in full operation – one of the fastest recoveries on the island, beyond our own sector. The Juncos’ site is far more than a manufacturing facility, it is more than 30 years of cumulative knowledge, talent, and experience that have made it the flagship site in our global manufacturing network.
Amgen has committed a further USD one billion to Juncos in the past year – USD 650 million announced in late 2025 and a further USD 300 million earlier this year. Where is that investment going, and what does it signal about the site’s future direction?
This new USD one billion investment is significant across all sectors, and what excites me about it is that we are opening a genuinely new chapter after 30 years here. The USD 650 million announced in late 2025 is focused primarily on drug substance and drug product operations – expanding manufacturing capacity and integrating advanced technologies throughout those processes. The subsequent USD 300 million investment earlier this year then extends our footprint into packaging operations. So, we are touching all three main stages of production: drug substance, drug product, and packaging.
What these investments strengthen is not only our capacity but our positioning to support Amgen’s growing portfolio globally. We are growing across all of our US manufacturing sites, and this investment ensures Juncos can serve patients in the US and internationally on a reliably expanding basis. Pro-growth policies that support domestic science and manufacturing in the US – including the territories such as Puerto Rico – have also reinforced our confidence in continuing to invest here.
But I want to be clear about something important: Juncos is not simply part of Amgen’s manufacturing history – it continues to be a central part of our future. We are building upon more than three decades of manufacturing experience with advanced technologies, automation, and increasingly sophisticated digital capabilities. And ultimately, investment in manufacturing is about patients. Scientific innovation only fulfils its promise when we can translate it into medicines manufactured reliably, at high quality, and at the scale needed to reach people worldwide. That is the responsibility our team here takes very seriously.
Having also led manufacturing operations in Rhode Island earlier in your Amgen career, you have a rare vantage point on what Puerto Rico offers and where it still has work to do. What is your honest assessment?
My mandate while in Rhode Island was to help build a life science hub. Stepping into this role in Puerto Rico, where an existing life sciences ecosystem and significant manufacturing infrastructure already existed, caused me to realize there is something very special and rare happening in Puerto Rico. The single most important advantage is talent. The island has decades of pharmaceutical and biotechnology manufacturing experience, which has created a workforce of several thousand people with deep technical expertise across engineering, automation, manufacturing operations, quality, maintenance, process development, and many other specialised disciplines. That type of knowledge is extraordinarily difficult to replicate. You can build infrastructure in two or three years and install equipment relatively quickly. But developing and retaining an experienced workforce – one with the collective understanding of the rigour required to manufacture complex biologic medicines – takes decades. I would say that to anyone in the world: you cannot shortcut that.
Puerto Rico has also built a true life sciences ecosystem, with several top-tier universities developing scientific and technical talent. There are experienced suppliers and service providers on the island. And there is a substantial concentration of active biopharma and medical device manufacturers – with more than 120 FDA-approved sites, essentially every major name in the industry. Through Hurricane Maria in particular, these companies developed a genuine culture of collaboration rather than competition – companies helped each other during the recovery, and that relationship between industry, government, and universities has created something quite unique. Operating within the US regulatory and legal framework while serving global markets is another significant advantage. After decades of FDA oversight of industry on the island, the track record speaks for itself.
On challenges, the number one issue when competing globally for new investment is the reliability of utilities – primarily electrical supply, and to a lesser extent water. Electrical outages in Puerto Rico make national news, and that may cause concern to new investors who have to factor in the additional cost of building their own reliability infrastructure. For existing companies like Amgen, we have invested heavily to help mitigate these issues. For example, we have two high-voltage transmission feeder lines when only one is needed; if there is an outage anywhere on the island, the entire campus switches to backup generators within 20 seconds. We are located in the centre of the island near the rainforest and operate deep wells, so we have existing mitigations against drought. For a company considering Puerto Rico for the first time, these are real considerations. The government recognises this and is working systematically to address it.
Reshoring is one of the defining policy ambitions of the current US administration. How do you see Puerto Rico fitting into that story, and what does the island need to do to capture the opportunity fully?
Puerto Rico should be at the centre of reshoring conversations and recognized as one of the nation’s strongest assets in advancing supply chain resilience and biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The recognition that US manufacturing capabilities and supply chain resilience need to be strengthened is not just a domestic American instinct. During the pandemic, we all lived through what happens when globally connected supply chains are disrupted. In the specific context of the US and biopharma, few locations can point to the depth of experience and scale that Puerto Rico has developed, including withstanding major natural disasters. That is not a claim many places in the world can make.
The island has an existing foundation on which to build purposefully and quickly. Many states are making significant investments to grow their biopharmaceutical manufacturing presence. Puerto Rico’s advantage is that it can build on decades of established infrastructure, workforce expertise, and manufacturing experience. Competition for advanced manufacturing investment is significant – within the US and globally.
To fully capture this opportunity, Puerto Rico must continue to strengthen its competitiveness by improving utility reliability across the island, developing increasingly specialised talent in partnership with universities, embracing digitalisation and automation, and strengthening the supplier ecosystem. Because everything reaching the island comes by ship or plane, there is a real opportunity to establish more on-island suppliers across key categories, reducing that dependency. These focused investments, combined with existing infrastructure, would position Puerto Rico as a genuinely premier global destination for this type of manufacturing.
Reshoring should not be thought of narrowly as simply bringing manufacturing back. That would be too small a conception of what is possible. It is about building a stronger, more resilient, and technologically advanced US manufacturing capability at the same time. The USD one billion we are investing in Juncos is in new technologies that will propel our operations to serve patients globally.
Looking ahead, digitalisation and AI are reshaping manufacturing across the industry. How is Juncos thinking about that opportunity, and what does it look like in practice at your scale?
The immediate priority is execution. The USD one billion investment represents commitments to our patients, and executing on those commitments – flawlessly, at the quality and scale required – is what the team here is focused on. That does not happen on its own; it happens through the people operating these spaces, the creative minds who ensure we continue to move forward collectively.
The new lines and facilities we are building come equipped with far more advanced digital capabilities than anything we have operated before, and that creates both an opportunity and a responsibility to transform how our people work alongside those systems. We are building digital twins for certain parts of the operation. We are learning from other industries that are further ahead in deploying advanced digital technologies at scale.
What makes this particularly significant at a site like Juncos is the depth of historical data we have accumulated. On a single day here, we generate more useful operational data than many smaller companies produce in a year. When you think about that accumulated across 30-plus years – and increasingly accessible at your fingertips in seconds – that becomes an enormous strategic asset. The ability to query years of manufacturing history in real time, learn from it, and apply it to current decisions is a game changer. Digitalisation is an exponential accelerant, and using it correctly enables progress at a fundamentally different pace.
This is as much a mindset shift as a technology investment. It requires people to think around the next corner – and then the corner after that – because that is how quickly digitalisation is developing. It is an important next leap for Amgen, and one I am seeing reflected across several other entities on the island who have recognised the same opportunity.
Any final thoughts on where Amgen and Puerto Rico go from here?
Puerto Rico has a proven track record of competing and delivering at the highest levels of global manufacturing. That is a significant accomplishment that should not go unrecognised. We have navigated the highs and lows together, and we have built the workforce and ecosystem needed to sustain this over time.
I also believe there is a tremendous opportunity ahead – not only for Amgen but for all the players here. The key is to build on this foundation purposefully, with a few highly focused initiatives and investments. And at the centre of all of it are the people. Retaining a critical mass of specialised talent on the island is essential. We have seen in other sectors – medicine, for instance – where people with expertise have left Puerto Rico and not returned. We cannot allow that to happen in this industry. Maintaining the pipeline of talent through universities, sustaining strong employers, and aligning with government – that has been the winning formula here for decades.
Amgen is proud to have been part of Puerto Rico’s transformation from an agriculture and tourism economy into a manufacturing powerhouse – one where biopharma and device manufacturing now account for a significant share of GDP. We are equally eager to help shape what comes next. That next chapter is what we are now investing in.
