Personalised Healthcare in R & D

Fitting the treatment to the patients is an ambitious goal. Today molecular insights and technologies are available to better adjust treatment to the patients. But discovering and developing novel medicines and diagnostic markers (Biomarkers) is still a very complex and time consuming undertaking. Roche research and development sees Personalised Healthcare as integral part of its strategy.

With its expertise in molecular biology across diagnostics and pharmaceuticals, Roche is uniquely positioned to create value for patients and the healthcare system.

Within the Roche Personalised Healthcare (PHC)-approach integrated teams use new scientific insights and advances in technologies for the development of novel drugs and diagnostic tests.

Using this approach will help:

• To better understand the complexity and heterogeneity of diseases on a molecular level
• To search for biomarkers which may help to identify drug targets and optimise drug candidate selection
• To  identify and use biomarkers to characterise or select patient groups for clinical trials
• To identify those patients who are most likely to benefit

Roche has structures and processes in place to effectively foster Personalised Healthcare throughout its research and development departments.The key is to align Pharma and Diagnostics to allow the systematic collaboration between the two different businesses. Hence, at Roche, each Pharma project team has easy access to Diagnostics capabilities.

To ensure that the benefits of PHC are optimally utilised Roche needs a high degree of flexibility especially when it comes to diagnostic test development in research and development on suitable diagnostic platforms or technologies.

Roche has made a number of strategic acquisitions which complement the in-house technologies to advance PHC such as

• 454 Life Sciences (ultra fast gene sequencing)
• NimbleGen (high-density DNA microarrays)
• Ventana (tissue based diagnostics)