Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is a leader in research-focused healthcare with combined strengths in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.
Roche is the world’s largest biotech company with truly differentiated medicines in oncology, virology, inflammation, metabolism and CNS.
About Roche
Roche is also the world leader in in-vitro diagnostics, tissue-based cancer diagnostics and a pioneer in diabetes management. Roche’s personalised healthcare strategy aims at providing medicines and diagnostic tools that enable tangible improvements in the health, quality of life and survival of patients.
In 2008, Roche had over 81,000 employees worldwide and invested almost 9 billion Swiss francs in R&D. The Group posted sales of 45.6 billion Swiss francs. Genentech, United States, is a wholly owned member of the Roche Group. Roche has a majority stake in Chugai Pharmaceutical, Japan.
Research & Development
Roche believe that finding innovative solutions for serious medical problems is what being a healthcare company is all about. We strive to create clinically differentiated drugs and diagnostics to help people live longer, healthier lives.
Progress in the sciences is providing crucial insights into the molecular mechanisms of disease, opening up new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat illness. As both a diagnostics and a pharmaceuticals company, Roche is ideally placed to contribute towards more personalised medicine.
Roche’s “Personalised Healthcare” approach aims at tailoring medicine more closely to patients’ individual needs. We are confident that, with our outstanding people, cutting-edge research and state-of-the-art technology base, we can play a leading role in making healthcare more ‘personal’, and hence safer and more effective.
Roche Diagnostics – Our Vision
Diagnostics are set to play an increasingly important role in the future of healthcare as genetic knowledge presents new and exciting opportunities. Our vision of the future is to strengthen our leading position in diagnostics and shape the health information market by integrating test results and medical information to support medical decision-makers and superior patient management.
This vision drives our pipeline of new products – the broadest in our industry – and will present us with even more opportunities to make a real difference in people’s lives.
Diagnostics Research Centres
About 2,000 scientists – in Mannheim and Penzburg (in Germany), Graz (in Austria), Rotkreuz and Burgdorf (in Switzerland) and Indianapolis and Pleasanton (in the USA) are committed to developing new diagnostic tools and services for diagnostic laboratories as well as for patient self monitoring.
In addition, Roche Applied Science is dedicated to providing the science community with the best research tools based on the latest scientific and technological advances.
Dedicated centres combine R&D, manufacturing and global marketing support activities in integrated sites in order to bring together.
Roche in the UK and Ireland
Roche is proud to have been part of the UK health environment since 1908. Today, we employ around 2,000 multi-disciplined individuals based at our Pharmaceuticals headquarters in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire and at our Diagnostics headquarters in Burgess Hill, West Sussex.
Both teams of professionals work together wherever possible to enhance Roche’s offering and reputation in the UK healthcare market liaising closely with healthcare experts, government bodies and patient organisations to add value and to help ensure equal access to products.
Roche Diagnostics in the UK and Ireland
In the UK and Ireland, our £174.5 million Diagnostics business based in Burgess Hill, Sussex, employs over 460 individuals. As the UK leading provider of diagnostics solutions, we offer a uniquely broad product portfolio and supply a wide array of innovative testing products and services to researchers, physicians, patients, hospitals and laboratories throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Improving the quality of life for millions of people in the UK every day is an overriding goal for Roche Diagnostics Ltd, and, as such our products are designed to empower patients to monitor their own chronic conditions easily and accurately. An example of this is our Accu-Chek and CoaguChek range of innovative self-testing systems for people with diabetes and those receiving anti-coagulation therapy.
With cobas, our professional diagnostics portfolio, our aim is to help the clinicians who care for patients, to detect, monitor and manage medical condition more effectively – providing the right results at the right time and in the right place.
In hospitals for example, our products play two important roles. Firstly, they are the backbone of laboratory services, providing accurate diagnosis of patient samples either taken at the hospital or in the community. Through our portfolio of instruments – which bring together the latest innovation in clinical chemistry, automated systems and immunodiagnostics – Roche is able to offer hi-tech solutions that provide fast and accurate results for today’s laboratory within an overall simplified process.
The second role within hospitals relates to our portable products which enable the rapid and often life-saving diagnosis of medical conditions when every second counts – in Accident & Emergency, intensive care or in the operating theatre.
Roche pioneered the application of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology – the most advanced method in molecular diagnostics and now a recognised industry standard. As the leader in this field, our products enable clinicians to monitor the progression of diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis C, and enables healthcare professionals to monitor effectively their patients’ responses to treatment.
Roche’s new tissue diagnostics portfolio, enabled through its recent acquisition of Ventana, means not only does it now occupy a unique position at the forefront of companion diagnostics and advanced tissue staining technology, but also that it has broadened its overall offerings in in-vitro diagnostics and enhanced its stance as the world’s leading personalised healthcare company.
In addition, we are one of the world’s leading manufacturers of research reagents and systems for determining the causes of, or people’s predisposition to, disease. These products and services, focusing on molecular biology, provide scientists with the tools for ground-breaking work in genomics and gene therapy.
The acquisition of NimbleGen has strengthened Roche’s position as a major player and complete solution provider in the genomics research market by extending our activities into the microarray segment. The Array Systems from NimbleGen are highly synergistic and will complement the existing Roche portfolio of innovative genomic research tools such as the LightCycler qPCR systems and the high-throughput Sequencing Systems from the recently acquired company 454 Life Sciences.
Wherever possible, our diagnostics and pharmaceuticals businesses work together to provide integrated approaches to tackling diseases such as heart failure and Hepatitis C.
Customer Satisfaction
Customers all over the UK and Ireland rely on our products, and their confidence has made Roche Diagnostics the number one company in most of the areas in which it does business. We understand our customer needs by maintaining strong relationships with them and we have the industry’s most rigorous customer satisfaction programme.
We strive to exceed our customers’ expectations with a range of services including next-day delivery, a team of fully qualified nurse educators, specialist telephone support, and a network of engineers who are able to respond rapidly to our customers’ needs. Our business is also backed up by a comprehensive Business Continuity plan designed to meet the challenges of the business environment in which we operate.
An Employer of Choice
Our Diagnostics Head Office in Sussex (and similarly our Pharmaceutical Headquarters in Welwyn Garden City) art state-of-the-art facilities comprising of comprehensive customer training suites including a showroom, laboratories, lecture rooms and hospitality facilities.
We have a highly dynamic organisation that nurtures high performance. The organisation is also committed to Corporate Social Responsibility including developing links with the community and recruiting from the local area and universitiess
