‘Invested to Grow’
Roche Tissue Diagnostics Still Expanding Presence After 40 Years
By Dave Perry
It’s been decades since Roche employee Jill German sold raw materials to Dr. Tom Grogan and his company, Ventana Medical Systems, a Tucson startup then headquartered on Prince Road.
Since then, Roche, a global biotech giant, assumed ownership of Ventana Medical Systems and set Oro Valley as the home base for Roche Tissue Diagnostics − RTD. German is now head of RTD, an acknowledged world leader in automated, tissue-based cancer diagnostic technology. The company operates out of a massive, recently expanded facility in Oro Valley with another manufacturing plant nearby in Marana. RTD has a combined workforce of approximately 1,800 employees and contractors.
“I don’t think I would have ever imagined the truly massive impact this company would have in the world,” German reflected when Roche Tissue Diagnostics celebrated its 40th anniversary on Jan. 22, and at the same time, dedicated its 110,000-square-foot research laboratory for Roche’s Personalized Healthcare Solutions division in Oro Valley’s Innovation Park.
Last year, 41 million patients worldwide benefited from diagnostic tests developed, manufactured and analyzed with RTD technology created in Oro Valley.
Today, RTD occupies 13 buildings in Oro Valley and two in Marana, with 680,000 square feet of workspace. More than 200 of its employees assemble specialized instruments in RTD’s 60,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at Interstate 10 and Tangerine Road. RTD has invested millions in its physical plant in Oro Valley over the last five years, German said.
This is business, certainly, but it’s also personal for local RTD employees, and increasingly personalized for each patient.
“We are the toolmakers for the hospitals, the teaching hospitals, our customers,” said Gilbert Valencia, a 25-year Roche employee who began at the company when it was still Ventana Medical Systems. “You can see that direct impact to our patients.”
“I’ll meet people whose family members were diagnosed and treated with products we’ve worked on,” said pathologist Mike Flores, senior medical director of personalized healthcare solutions. “It’s an amazing privilege for me to be a part of it. We are creating solutions for our family and our community.”
German gets emotional when she discusses her sister who was diagnosed with breast cancer through the use of RTD testing. While that finding was deeply upsetting, her sister is doing well, and German finds solace in knowing her sister “can be confident in the results she received.”
“For the last 40 years, we have been delivering diagnostic certainty” to cancer patients and their healthcare providers, German told more than 500 employees and community members at the Jan. 22 celebration. “It’s only through your work we can do this.”
The re-tooled building RTD dedicated in January was a biomedical research facility opened by Sanofi and later purchased by Icagen. Roche purchased it in late 2023, and it is now Building 10, home to Personalized Healthcare Solutions.
“There have been years of dreaming for this building,” German said. “This acquisition sets us up for growth we’re experiencing now, and growth into the future.”
Inside B10’s accredited laboratory, approximately 140 “brilliant people are doing the work to ensure patients around the world have diagnostics to lead them to the right therapy,” German said.
Talia Lee, an associate scientist for pharmaceutical services, explained that scientists are developing assays – lab tests – that identify proteins called biomarkers. RTD researchers work with more than 85 pharmaceutical companies to create companion tests for their prospective cancer drugs. They tested thousands of patient samples last year for hundreds of different biomarkers, “and that’s ever-growing,” German said.
“The drug attaches to the protein,” Lee said. The pharma company says, “ ‘This is the protein. Can you develop the test?’ ” And that’s precisely what the personalized healthcare team does.
“Does their particular therapy work for my specific cancer?” Lee asked. If not, “you won’t take the therapy needlessly.”
Instead, German said, “You take the one that’s most likely to help you the fastest. It’s personalized medicine. It’s about bringing value to the medical profession and to patients.”
Extensive time and effort goes into developing the diagnostic tests. “We want to make sure our tests are safe and effective in order to help providers get the right treatment to the right patient at the right time” Flores said. “This includes using exciting new tools in digital pathology and image analysis.”
Development of new tests is crucial to RTD’s business strategy. It is “doing now what patients need next,” said Lidija Pestic-Dragovich, a longtime Ventana/Roche employee and senior director for pharmaceutical partnering and alliance.
“If we engage with pharma partners at an early stage, they’re most likely to stay with us,” Pestic-Dragovich said. “We are the leader, but we do have competitors. We should never relax.”
“We don’t need patients to know about us,” German said. “We need healthcare providers and laboratories to trust us, and they do. That is the bottom line.”
RTD creates and packages “reagents,” chemical solutions used to “stain” or color tiny amounts of tissue or biopsies. Under exacting conditions, an RTD instrument can apply the solution to the tissue and reveal its cellular components and whether the collected tissue includes cancerous cells and if so, what type.
At one point, RTD’s Building 1 hosted both instrument manufacturing and reagent production. When instrument manufacturing moved to Marana, RTD invested several million dollars into B1, dedicating 19,000 square feet to streamlined reagent dispenser assembly, filling and cold storage. Throughout the retrofitting, it ran three shifts a day to meet global needs.
“We couldn’t shut down production,” said Josh Orosco, RTD finance business partner.
“We had to keep reagent production going in the existing location while construction of the expansion was underway,” said Himanshu Parikh, VP of manufacturing operations, pointing to one side of the building, then the other.
Roche engineered and installed two automated dispenser filling lines, machines twice as fast as their predecessors. Each line can fill 4 million dispensers a year. The building has room for a third line, which, when necessary, will boost its automated annual capacity to keep up with customer demand.
Three shifts of colleagues work six days a week to operate manual and automated assembly and filling operations. Completed dispensers are shipped to Roche’s facilities in Indianapolis, then to providers and patients around the world.
When it comes to where RTD finds talent for its massive and advanced operation, German stresses the company has “really diverse” job opportunities for the local workforce. “Anything that it takes to run a business, we have here.”
“From GED to Ph.D.,” said Christoph Majewski, VP and lifecycle leader in personalized healthcare solutions.
While management-level talent sometimes comes from regional, national and international pools, “we hire a lot of our workforce from here,” German said. “Many of our departments have deep relationships at the U of A, and ASU as well.”
Pima Community College, Pima Joint Technical Education District and a vibrant summer intern program are other sources of talent.
“In the Bay Area, there are hundreds of companies competing for talent,” Parikh said. “Here in Tucson, we’re one of the few players. That’s good for us.”
Grogan, now RTD’s “chief inspiration officer,” was inspired more than 40 years ago “to change the practice of medicine” by automating cancer diagnosis, German said. “We’ve been doing that. This team is taking it even further.”
Within two years of Roche’s 2008 acquisition of Ventana, German said, “You saw the lights go on around the world. Countries are recognizing earlier detection leads to a healthier, population, with reduced healthcare costs.”
“This is still the best diagnostic technology you can get,” Majewski said. “It’s a fairly small percentage of the cost of healthcare.”
It is “fast, affordable and readily available,” Flores said.
And it is now deeply rooted in Oro Valley.
“We’re committed to this area,” German said. “We’re invested to grow, and to make sure our people have a great place to work and live.”
PHOTO COURTESY ROCHE TISSUE DIAGNOSTICS
