HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co. said Friday that it will build a $3.5 billion manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania, as the company expands domestic production and capitalizes on surging sales of obesity and diabetes treatments.
Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly, maker of weight-loss treatment Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, is in the midst of a broader domestic expansion that includes new plants it has announced in Texas, Virginia and Alabama. Another facility is under construction in Indiana.
The company said the new plant in Fogelsville, just outside Allentown, will make injectable drugs and devices, including producing weight-loss drug retatrutide, a once-a-week injectable drug that is still being studied and not available for public use.
Construction was expected to begin this year and finish in 2031, it said.
Sales of Zepbound and Mounjaro boosted the company's third-quarter profit to a record $5.58 billion. Third-quarter revenue was $17.6 billion, up more than 50% from the same quarter a year earlier. Zepbound and Mounjaro alone accounted for $10 billion in sales in the company's third quarter.
FILE - A sign for Eli Lilly & Co. stands outside their corporate headquarters in Indianapolis on April 26, 2017. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)
TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 22, 2026--
Blair Health, a clinical infrastructure company that enables generalist healthcare providers to deliver specialist-level care, has raised CAD $4.24 million in pre-seed financing, marking the company's first institutional round and bringing total capital raised to date to CAD $4.5 million. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Business Development Bank of Canada's (BDC) Thrive Venture Fund, Accelia Capital, and Ogaei, with participation from Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI) through its Life Sciences Innovation Fund (LSIF), and angel investors.
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Blair will use the funding to accelerate engineering and product development, expand its commercial presence across Canada and into the U.S., and invest in the clinical operations, provider network, team and infrastructure required to scale the business. This includes growing its employer channel in Canada, collaborating with public-sector health systems, and expanding its U.S. employer business.
“The fundamental problem in healthcare today is that the traditional model for delivering specialist care doesn’t scale,” said Madge Rumman, co-founder and CEO of Blair Health. “We’ve spent the last year proving that specialist knowledge can be encoded into technology without removing the clinician from care, and that the same architecture can be applied across specialties. The clinical infrastructure we are building enables specialist expertise to reach far more patients, particularly in areas of medicine where backlogs are greatest and subspecialists are scarce.”
A clinical model built to scale access to specialist care
Blair's clinical infrastructure is built with medical subspecialists, encoding their assessment logic, guideline-informed treatment protocols, escalation triggers, and follow-up pathways into software. That infrastructure enables Blair's in-house nurse practitioners and family physicians to deliver specialist-level care, with subspecialists providing oversight and support for complex cases. It is also why patients can see a provider within days instead of waiting months or years for an appointment.
Blair is also built around what happens between appointments. Patients track their symptoms over time, and those trends feed back into the care plan so treatment is adjusted based on evidence. Each patient receives guidance personalized to their own assessments and clinical diagnoses, and can message their provider between visits.
“Expanding access to specialized care is a significant opportunity to improve outcomes for women while building innovative healthcare businesses,” said Roxanne Turcotte, SVP, Inclusive and Government Funds, BDC. “This investment reflects our fund's commitment to backing women-led companies with strong growth potential and BDC's mandate to help Canadian innovators scale and create lasting economic impact.”
From clinical validation to national scale
Blair proved its model in menopause, one of the largest specialist backlogs in Canadian healthcare, where women can wait up to two years for an appointment. The menopause pathway was built with Blair co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Lindsay Shirreff, one of the few fellowship-trained menopause subspecialists practising in Canada, and was clinically validated against Blair's own clinical data set ahead of commercial launch in May 2025.
“The menopause pathway performs at 98.7% clinical accuracy, and we can train a provider to deliver it in under four hours,” adds Dr. Shirreff.
Blair also established that the architecture behind its clinical model extends across specialties. Working with leading specialists, the company has built new verticals in urology and pelvic health, led by urologist Dr. Sarah Peltz, and in clinical nutrition and weight management, led by Dr. Pooja Singhal, a board-certified gastroenterologist and obesity medicine physician. Each new vertical runs on the same technology stack.
Blair launched direct-to-consumer in May 2025 and has since grown to more than 2,300 users in Canada. Between 55 and 65 percent of steady-state visits are follow-ups, which reflects a longitudinal care model rather than one-off consultations.
Blair is available to women in every Canadian province, with French-language provider matching, and in six U.S. states, with more to come.
Employer pilots converting into annual workplace benefit contracts
In the U.S., employers are absorbing healthcare costs that rise every year without producing answers. Women cycle through appointments, referrals, and tests and still leave without a diagnosis or a treatment plan, and the employer pays for every step. When offered as a workplace benefit, Blair gives employees direct access to specialist-level assessment and treatment, so plan spend goes toward resolving a condition.
Blair piloted its employer offering in Canada with leading organizations across professional services, hospitality, and financial services, and those pilots have converted into recurring annual contracts. The employer channel went from close to zero a year ago to roughly half of Blair's revenue in the first half of 2026.
Fairmont Royal York introduced Blair to colleagues through an onsite education session before moving to a paid pilot. “Even employers with strong health and wellness programs can have gaps when it comes to supporting women’s health needs across different stages of life,” said Ian McLaren, Health & Wellness Manager at Fairmont Royal York. “Working with Blair Health has shown us how important it is to give colleagues timely access to specialist care and resources that meet those needs. When employees feel their health is understood and supported, it can have a meaningful impact on their wellbeing, confidence and how they experience work.”
“Women's health remains one of the largest underserved opportunities in healthcare, and Blair Health is tackling this gap with a fundamentally different approach,” said Catherine Poulin-Filion, Partner at Accelia Capital. “What stood out to us was the team's ability to rethink how care can be delivered rather than simply digitizing an existing model. Blair has paired a significant market need with a strong clinical foundation and a clear vision for building a new category of healthcare company.”
About Blair Health
Blair Health is a clinical infrastructure company building technology that scales specialist medical knowledge. Its proprietary clinical models encode specialist-designed assessments, clinical pathways, treatment protocols, guardrails and escalation rules into software that enables generalist healthcare providers to deliver specialist-level care with continuous clinical oversight. Blair currently provides specialist-designed care across menopause and perimenopause, urology and pelvic health, and clinical nutrition and weight management, across Canada and in a growing number of U.S. states. For more information, visit Blair Health online.
Blair was co-founded in December 2024 by Madge Rumman, Chief Executive Officer and Dr. Lindsay Shirreff, Chief Medical Officer
