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Roche makes and sells medicines, especially cancer drugs, and diagnostic tests that help doctors figure out what is wrong with patients.
Roche is one of the world's biggest drug companies, and it really runs two businesses side by side. The first is pharmaceuticals: it invents and sells prescription medicines, with cancer treatment as its signature strength. The second is diagnostics: the tests and lab equipment that hospitals and clinics use to detect disease and guide treatment decisions. The two halves fit together neatly — a test can tell a doctor which patient will respond to a Roche drug, so selling one helps sell the other.
The drug side is where most of the money and drama live. Roche's big sellers include Genentech-style biotech medicines like Rituxan, Herceptin, and Avastin, which for years were among the best-selling cancer drugs on earth. That strength is also the company's main headache: those blockbuster biologics have been losing patent protection, and cheaper "biosimilar" copies are eating into sales. Roche's answer has been to push newer medicines — Hemlibra for hemophilia, Ocrevus for multiple sclerosis, and a growing suite of oncology drugs — plus its diagnostics arm, which keeps growing steadily and throws off reliable cash. Roche is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and is famously controlled by the Hoffmann–Oeri family, descendants of founder Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, who started it in 1896. The family's holding company owns a big enough stake to effectively control the firm, which is unusual for a company this size. That structure lets Roche take a long view: it plows huge sums into research, roughly a fifth of revenue annually, and has a history of bold deals — buying the biotech pioneer Genentech outright in 2009 after years of partnership, and California-based Flatiron Health in 2018 for its cancer data business.
The company's cash gets used in a way shareholders love: a rising dividend, steady share buybacks, and reinvestment in R&D. It also faces real pressure — governments pushing down drug prices, competition from rivals like Novartis and Merck, and the slow, expensive reality that most experimental drugs fail. The bet that makes Roche interesting is simple: keep the pipeline full of new medicines and pair them with diagnostics, so the company stays essential to how cancer and other serious diseases get treated.
Saved answer · last researched 24 Oct 2026