Roche plans €200m investment in diagnostics facility
pharmafile | December 12, 2012 | News story | Manufacturing and Production | Diagnostics, Roche
Roche has said it intends to invest more than €200 million ($260m) in the construction of a new production plant for diagnostics in Penzberg in order to meet ‘rising demand’ for its products.
Roche reported a 4% rise in sales in its diagnostics division in the first nine months of 2012 to 7.5 billion Swiss francs ($8 billion), with a particularly strong performance by its immunoassay, clinical chemistry and coagulation monitoring businesses and tissue diagnostics.
Roche Diagnostics sells almost 100 different tests for its Elecsys clinical laboratory systems, and recently expanded the range with the launch of an immunoassay which measures the amount of vitamins D2 and D3 in serum and plasma.
This is expected to be major new product for the division, as around 1 billion people suffer from vitamin D deficiency worldwide. The kit was launched in the US in August and complements Roche’s portfolio of Elecsys bone metabolism tests, which have been growing strongly in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
The investment at the Penzberg site near Munich is designed to support Roche’s immunoassay testing kits, part of its professional diagnostics unit which is Roche’s largest, accounting for 3.8 billion francs in revenues in the first nine months of the year.
Immunoassays are used in laboratories and hospitals for the diagnosis and management of medical conditions such as heart attack, heart failure, hepatitis and cancer.
The new plant – dubbed the Diagnostics Operations Complex II (DOCII) – is scheduled to come online in December 2014 with the creation of around 50 new jobs, said Roche in a statement. It will consist of a six-storey laboratory building with a basement level and two adjacent single-level plant buildings, covering around 26,000 sq. m. in floor space.
Penzberg is the Roche’s largest European site for biotech R&D and production.
Phil Taylor
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