Roche in the U.S.
The year was 1896. As the Industrial Revolution was radically changing the face of Europe, Fritz Hoffmann founded F. Hoffmann-La Roche & Co. in Basel, Switzerland, naming the company after himself and his wife, Adéle La Roche.

In 1905, Roche’s founders embarked to create one of the early examples of corporate internationalization, expanding operations to the United States with the creation of Hoffmann-La Roche Chemical Works, Inc., in New York’s Manhattan district. The company was an importing and trading company for Roche products from Europe.

Though the U.S. business didn’t show a profit until 1922, Roche has experienced excellent progress ever since. Along the way, new facilities and technologies have been acquired, stimulating growth and new opportunities to expand our business. Today, Roche facilities stretch across the country in New Jersey, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Indiana, Colorado, California and Puerto Rico.

Mr. Hoffmann was a leader in keeping the customer’s desires at the heart of his efforts, making it his personal mission to deliver pharmaceuticals of uniform strength and quality. Today, with the 2005 U.S. FDA clearance of Roche Diagnostics’ innovative genetic test, the AmpliChip™ CYP450, that exemplary level of customer service continues to shine, growing the field of highly personalized medicine where the right dose for the individual may be determined by each patient’s ability to metabolize certain medicines.

It Started with a Start-Up
One of Roche’s paths to becoming the #1 diagnostics company worldwide traces its origin to a nondescript garage in Indianapolis where the genesis of one of Indiana’s most successful life sciences businesses took shape.

Willard “Bill” Eason was a chemical engineer at Ford Motor Company in Indianapolis. However, in 1964, his spirit of innovation took hold, and he decided to leave the comforts of his steady job behind to explore new challenges, founding Bio-Dynamics, Inc., and consequently, starting an industrial revolution of his own.

From these humble Indiana beginnings, Mr. Eason saw his entrepreneurial ideas take shape as he launched the first in a successful series of Unimeters. This simple, yet highly innovative device, provided a fast, low-cost means for physicians to perform accurate analyses of certain routine lab work right in their own offices. 

It was only a short time before operations moved to the basement of Indiana University Medical Center. At the end of its first year, Bio-Dynamics yielded more than $150,000 in sales and a profit of $16,000.

The business continued to grow with more people and new products, eventually to the point where the original parcel of land was purchased in northeastern Indianapolis, marking the current location of Roche Diagnostics’ North American headquarters.  Plant One (Building P) was occupied in 1966, and seven products were sold that year. A short time later, an addition tripled the size of Plant One, and the campus has been on a steady growth pattern ever since.

At the time when Bio-Dynamics was acquired by Boehringer Mannheim Corporation (BMC) of New York in 1974, sales had reached $25 million annually with profits exceeding $1.5 million. While the original bid by BMC was not received favorably by Bill Eason and key investors, the two sides eventually settled and Mr. Eason stayed on with Bio-Dynamics/bmc until his retirement in 1979, continuously instilling a passion for innovative excellence in his colleagues.

The Torch Is Passed:
Eason’s strong entrepreneurial spirit provided the foundation for continued growth and innovation.  Soon after the acquisition in 1974, the researchers created the diabetes/urinalysis business and it took off with the introduction of urine chemistry strips. Bio-Dynamics/bmc launched Chemstrip® bG diabetes test strips in the U.S., and by 1979, test strips sales alone had reached $1 million.  

Together, BMC and its U.S. and European R&D teams pioneered many new developments and started what later became ACCU-CHEK®, the brand recognized today as a leader in diabetes care. 

From Garage to Indy’s Life Sciences Leader:
What started on Hague Road in the 1960s grew by orders of magnitude into the largest diagnostics company in the U.S.

Roche could have been quite content with that ranking, as it continued to grow ACCU-CHEK, laboratory systems and reagents, and other diagnostic successes.   However, in 1991, Roche acquired worldwide rights to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, which it previously had licensed to develop innovative molecular tests for HIV and other diseases.  This provided a new era for diagnostics.   That same year, Roche Molecular Systems, Inc., (RMS) a global business unit of Roche Diagnostics, which later relocated from New Jersey to California, was founded exclusively to develop diagnostics and other tests using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, a process that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. Today, Roche owns more than 130 patents related to PCR processes alone.

In 1998, The Roche Group found an opportunity to accelerate its portfolio in diagnostics, so it   acquired Corange Ltd, the umbrella company for Boehringer Mannheim, and quickly became a market leader in diagnostics.

Through innovative people, a keen sense of performance and leadership, Roche is well positioned to continue its journey of success for years to come.