Roche investing $180m on US diagnostics facilities
pharmafile | October 18, 2010 | News story | Research and Development | Diagnostics, Roche, Ventana, personalised medicine
Swiss drugmaker Roche is planning to invest $180 million and boost staff at its diagnostics subsidiary Ventana Medical Systems, as the drug industry moves closer to a personalised approach to medicine delivery.
The investment in new facilities and staff will take place at Ventana’s site in Oro Valley near Tucson, Arizona, according to local news reports.
Roche bought Ventana for $3.4 billion in 2008 specifically to tap into the company’s tissue-based diagnostics expertise and align it with its own therapeutics portfolio in order to make progress in personalised medicine. The latter field has been talked about for years but there are still only a few examples of therapeutics and diagnostics being used routinely alongside each other to guide treatment decisions.
In 2008, Ventana’s diagnostic for HER2 status was already being used to determine which patients should receive Herceptin (trastuzumab), a HER2-targetting breast cancer therapy sold by Roche subsidiary Genentech, and this is held up as one of the first examples of personalised medicine being used in practice. At the time Roche said it wanted to look at additional ways to get its drugs and diagnostics units to work in alignment.
Roche already spent $100 million to expand Ventana in 2009, buying up additional land and recruiting around 250 additional staff to bring the headcount up to 1,000. The latest tranche of investment will be made over the next five years and add another 500 positions.
The company has been offered sweeteners by the local and state authorities in the form of incentives worth over $10 million, including the waiver of $8.5 million in property taxes and another $2 million in stimulus funding.
A report in the Arizona Daily Star suggests that Ventana was not a shoo-in for the extra investment, with Roche Diagnostics US headquarters in Indianapolis and two other sites in Southern California and New Jersey also in the running.
Phil Taylor
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