Pharmaceutical
The headquarters are in Basel and the company has many sites around the world - including: Nutley, NJ, Palo Alto, California, Pleasanton, Branchburg, Fishers, Indiana, Florence, South Carolina and Ponce, Puerto Rico in the US, Welwyn Garden City and Burgess Hill in the UK, Clarecastle in Ireland, Mannheim and Penzberg in Germany, and Shanghai in China.
The company also owns the American biotechnology company Genentech, which is a wholly owned subsidiary, and the Japanese biotechnology company Chugai Pharmaceuticals.
Roche's revenues during fiscal year 2008 were CHF 45.62 billion. Descendants of the founding Hoffmann and Oeri families own half of the company. Swiss pharma company Novartis owns 33% of the company.
F. Hoffmann–La Roche is a full member of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
History
Founded in 1896 by Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, the company was early on known for producing various vitamin preparations and derivatives. In 1934, it became the first company to mass produce synthetic vitamin C, under the brand name Redoxon. In 1957 it introduced the class of tranquilizers known as benzodiazepines (with Valium and Rohypnol being the best known members). Its acne drug isotretinoin, marketed as Accutane and Roaccutane, also used as a form of chemotherapy for some cancers, has been linked with a number of severe side effects and remains highly controversial but highly effective at the same time. Roche has also produced various HIV tests and antiretroviral drugs. It bought the patents for the polymerase chain reaction technique in 1992. It manufactures and sells several cancer drugs.
In 1976, an accident at a chemical factory in Seveso, Italy owned by a subsidiary of Roche caused a large dioxin contamination; see Seveso disaster.
In 1982, the United States arm of the company acquired Biomedical Reference Laboratories for US$163.5 million. That company dated from the late 1960s, and was located in Burlington, North Carolina. That year Hoffmann–La Roche then merged it with all of its laboratories, and incorporated the merged company as Roche Biomedical Laboratories, Inc. in Burlington. By the early 1990s, Roche Biomedical became one of the largest clinical laboratory networks in the United States, with 20 major laboratories and US$600 million in sales.
On April 28, 1995 Hoffmann–La Roche sold Roche Biomedical Laboratories, Inc. to National Health Laboratories Holdings Inc. (which then changed its name to Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings). In 1994, Roche acquired Syntex.
On 12 March 2009 Roche agreed to fully acquire Genentech, in which it had held a majority stake since 1990,[5] after 8 months of negotiations. As a result of the Genentech acquisition, Roche plans to close its Palo Alto based research facilities to move research to south San Francisco and Nutley campuses Genentech became a wholly-owned subsidiary group of Roche on 25 March 2009.
