Roche invented modern targeted cancer therapy with Herceptin, Rituxan, and Avastin. It also runs the world’s largest in-vitro diagnostics business, processing 20 billion tests a year. In 2025, with $70.6 billion in revenue and 2,184 patent filings in India alone, the Basel company operates at a scale where drug discovery and diagnostic precision reinforce each other.
No company in the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India has filed more patents in India than Roche. The number is 2,184. Of those, 192 have been granted. The gap between filings and grants tells you something about the Indian Patent Office, but the filing volume itself tells you something more important about Roche: this is a company that has consistently treated India as a jurisdiction worth protecting its intellectual property in, even when the grant rate was punishing and the legal landscape was hostile to pharmaceutical patents.
The filing curve has a shape. It begins in 2000 with 18 applications, climbs through the early years of India’s post-TRIPS patent regime, and peaks around 2008 at 180 filings. That peak coincides with two things: Roche’s biologics portfolio was expanding fastest globally, and India’s 2005 patent law amendments had just created, for the first time, a legal framework under which pharmaceutical product patents could be obtained. The company filed hard during that window. By the mid-2010s, annual filings had dropped to the 50–85 range. The portfolio was maturing. Indian patent prosecution was slow, expensive, and uncertain.
Then a turn. From 2021 onward, filings have climbed again, reaching 60 in 2025. That trajectory tracks Roche’s new pipeline: bispecific antibodies, neurodegeneration, obesity. The company came back.
There is a before and after in oncology, and Roche drew the line. Before Herceptin, breast cancer treatment meant surgery, radiation, and cytotoxic chemotherapy that killed dividing cells indiscriminately. In 1998, Roche and Genentech introduced trastuzumab, a monoclonal antibody that targeted the HER2 protein on cancer cells. Chemotherapy could not do that. Trastuzumab did not cure every patient. But it changed the survival arithmetic for the roughly 20 per cent of breast cancer patients whose tumours overexpressed HER2, and it proved that targeted biological therapy could work in solid tumours.
Rituxan followed for B-cell lymphomas. Then Avastin, which targeted the blood supply that tumours needed to grow. Together, these three molecules were the original biologics trilogy, and they made Roche the world’s largest biotech company. At their peak, the three drugs generated tens of billions in combined annual revenue. The company layered additional therapies on top: Perjeta and Kadcyla for HER2-positive breast cancer, Tecentriq for immuno-oncology, Ocrevus for multiple sclerosis, Hemlibra for haemophilia.
India matters to this story in two ways. First, Roche’s biologics faced biosimilar competition in India earlier and more aggressively than in any other major market. Indian biosimilar manufacturers filed for versions of Herceptin, Rituxan, and Avastin as soon as patents and data exclusivity allowed. Second, Roche ran access programmes in India to provide its biologics to patients who could not afford the full price. In 2019 alone, Roche’s medicines treated 37 million patients globally. India became the place where Roche had to answer a question that every originator company will eventually face: can you coexist with biosimilar competition and still justify investing in new molecules? The answer, so far, has been yes, but only because the pipeline kept moving.
Most pharmaceutical companies sell drugs. Roche also sells the machines that tell doctors which drugs to prescribe. This is not a sideline. Roche’s diagnostics division is the largest in-vitro diagnostics company in the world, processing approximately 20 billion tests annually. The division manufactures the analysers, the reagents, the tissue-based cancer diagnostics, and the molecular testing platforms that hospitals and laboratories use to identify diseases, monitor treatments, and screen populations.
The combination is unusual. Among the world’s top pharmaceutical companies, none has a diagnostics business of comparable scale. Johnson & Johnson has medical devices. Abbott has diagnostics but a smaller pharmaceutical arm. Roche has both at full scale, and the two divisions are designed to feed each other. A companion diagnostic can identify patients whose tumours carry a specific mutation. The pharmaceutical division then sells the targeted therapy for that mutation. The diagnostic test creates the market for the drug. The drug creates the clinical need for the test.
In 2018, the diagnostics division contributed to the identification and monitoring of approximately 127 million patients treated by Roche medicines, while the company’s platforms ran 20 billion diagnostic tests across all applications. COVID-19 tested the arrangement. Roche scaled PCR testing globally while supplying Actemra (tocilizumab) for severe COVID pneumonia. One division identified the virus. The other treated the disease it caused. By 2022, with 100,920 employees and 87 new compounds plus 65 additional indications in the development pipeline, the two halves of Roche were feeding each other in a way that no competitor has managed to copy.
In 2025, Roche reported $70,609 million in revenue, growing at 7 per cent on a constant-exchange-rate basis. But the number worth watching is ten. That is how many medicines Roche has in final clinical phases for diseases where current treatments either do not work well or do not exist: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, obesity, and infectious disease.
The most striking entry on that list is zosurabalpin, a novel antibiotic targeting carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. If approved, it would be the first new class of antibiotics in over 60 years. Antibiotic resistance is the kind of problem that pharmaceutical companies have largely abandoned because the economics are unfavourable: antibiotics are used for short courses, are subject to stewardship programmes that limit volume, and face generic competition almost immediately upon patent expiry. That Roche is pursuing a new antibiotic class in 2025, when most of its competitors have walked away from the category, is worth noting.
Each of these disease areas matters in India. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s burden is growing as the population ages. Obesity is spreading in urban India. Antibiotic resistance is already a crisis in Indian hospitals, where carbapenem-resistant infections kill patients for whom no effective treatment exists. Roche’s Vabysmo, a bispecific antibody for wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic macular oedema, launched in 2023 and is the kind of molecule that will shape the company’s next chapter in India. The patent filings tell the same story: up from 35 in 2020 to 60 in 2025. Roche is filing again because it has things to protect.
Sources: Roche Annual Reports 2014–2025. Indian Patent Office (patent filing data). WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. OPPI member directory.