Year: 2016-17

Company: Roche Diagnostics

Liaison(s): Jim Harris, Alan Wright

The Roche Group is one of the world’s leading research-oriented healthcare organizations with combined strengths in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. Roche is the world leader in in-vitro diagnostics, tissue-based cancer diagnostics and diabetes management. Founded in 1969, the diagnostics division is composed of five distinct subunits: Sequencing Solutions, Molecular Diagnostics, Professional Diagnostics, Tissue Diagnostics, and Diabetes Care. Roche’s personalized healthcare strategy aims at providing medicines and diagnostic tools that enable tangible improvements in health, quality of life, and survival of patients. As part of this strategy, Roche Diagnostics is currently pursuing companion diagnostics. Being an emerging field, companion diagnostic launches are often complex and are rarely executed to their full potential. Add to this the recent trend of joint companion diagnostic and drug launches, and complexity becomes even more of an obstacle to optimal launch. Without launches done correctly, several consequences can arise such as lowered sales and less optimal treatments reaching patients. Roche Diagnostics would like to explore and identify gaps in knowledge within these joint launches to assure the maximum potential benefit. The purpose of the Roche Diagnostics TMP was to aid in the commercialization of companion diagnostics for these joint launches. The Roche TMP team was working to fill the gaps in knowledge in the industry for how to properly perform these joint launches. Additionally, the team translated this knowledge into recommendations and suggestions for standardizing companion diagnostics collaborations based on the results of their primary and secondary research.