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Roche Signs Licensing Agreement with Sysmex Inostics GmbH for emPCR Patent Portfolio

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Pleasanton, CA, USA, 21 February 2014 / B3C newswire / - Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced today a licensing agreement with Sysmex Inostics GmbH for its emPCR portfolio of patents. Under the terms of the licensing agreement, Roche grants Sysmex Inostics GmbH a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-bearing license.

Through emulsion PCR (emPCR), each DNA molecule is individually isolated within its own bubble in a water/oil emulsion, which includes a capture bead and PCR amplification reagents. As a result, even though about a million molecules are prepared simultaneously, each molecule is individually amplified to one single bead, the equivalent of having a million separate PCR reactions. This technique allows for massive parallelization (high throughput) that results in a significant cost advantage over Sanger sequencing. Sysmex Inostics GmbH is primarily a clinical service lab providing analysis of free circulating tumor-DNA in plasma for prediction of drug response and for monitoring of cancer by quantifying the amount of tumor DNA to detect relapse and to detect resistance mutations, utilizing emPCR technology. Actual Sysmex Inostics GmbH customers are pharmaceutical companies and academic and medical centers who use Sysmex Inostics services in clinical trials in which tissue collection is a problem.

Dan Zabrowski, Head of Roche Sequencing Unit, said “Roche has an active out-licensing program for its emPCR-based intellectual property portfolio. By continuing to out-license this technology, we contribute to the development of well-validated techniques within the molecular diagnostics field.”


About Roche

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is a leader in research-focused healthcare with combined strengths in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. Roche is the world’s largest biotech company, with truly differentiated medicines in oncology, infectious diseases, inflammation, metabolism and neuroscience. Roche is also the world leader in in vitro diagnostics and tissue-based cancer diagnostics, and a frontrunner in diabetes management. Roche’s personalised healthcare strategy aims at providing medicines and diagnostic tools that enable tangible improvements in the health, quality of life and survival of patients. In 2012 Roche had over 82,000 employees worldwide and invested over 8 billion Swiss francs in R&D. The Group posted sales of 45.5 billion Swiss francs. Genentech, in the United States, is a wholly owned member of the Roche Group. Roche is the majority shareholder in Chugai Pharmaceutical, Japan. For more information, please visit www.roche.com.

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For further information please contact:

Roche Sequencing
Beth Button
Phone: +1 317 847 5172
Email : This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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