The Swiss multinational Roche Pharma, one of the world's largest biotech companies and a global supplier of transformative innovative solutions across major disease areas, recently completed 125 years of its journey. On this occasion, Adriano Antonio Treve, area head of Central Eastern Europe, Turkey, Russia and Indian Subcontinent of Roche, who is currently visiting Bangladesh, sat down with Dhaka Tribune's Syed Samiul Basher Anik to share his insights on how the company can contribute to Bangladesh's development as well as its challenges and prospects in healthcare, particularly cancer treatment.
DT: Roche recently celebrated its 125th anniversary. Please tell us about this incredible journey and your plan for the next decade.
I am very proud to work in a company that can celebrate 125 years and this has happened mainly because Roche is an innovation driven company. We have outstanding products in disease areas that really make a difference to patients, where we can make a huge difference to physicians to help patients. If you look back, we have been a world leader in oncology, now we are expanding the broad base we have. Throughout these 125 years, we have been able to bring about all these innovations on a constant basis and this happened with lots of investment into research and development. Last year, we spent $13 billion in research and development alone. If you put this down, it is about $35 million a day that we invested in research and development.
I think that is a very successful story that will have a continuation in the years to come. We are on track and we are very positive about exploring many more therapeutic products in the coming days.
DT: How is Roche working to improve access to medicine in lower- and middle-income countries?
First of all, we cannot do it alone. We need to collaborate with patients and governments to find solutions together. We will bring extraordinary products to patients, but that is not the only thing. For low- and middle-income countries, we are in particular looking to how we can make these products accessible for patients in these countries.
This means perhaps bringing products to the market on a different price level, to approach in a way that low- and middle-income countries can have access to our medicines. We work with both traditional and non-traditional partners in developing countries to identify and solve gaps in care. We are committed to collaborate with the government to help reduce the burden of cancer through different initiatives.
DT: You are one of the key persons to have been involved during Roche's Bangladesh journey that began more than 30 years ago. In your experience, what needs to happen to implement the vision of personalized and patient-centered healthcare in Bangladesh?
Today, in Bangladesh, we have in principle 95%-98% generic driven medicines, but the thing is generic medicines can only survive if there is innovation that they can copy when the patent is gone. It is important not to close the door to new innovative compounds and also to make sure that there is a law or regulation to manage patent protection, as this is very critical for a market like Bangladesh.
DT: Over your three decade long journey, what collaboration has there been with the Bangladeshi government to improve access to Roche's medicine?
We are in discussion with the government especially about reimbursement for new innovative products for different areas. We do this and we want to continue to do this. We count on the collaboration of the government to gather its physicians and patients to make sure that we can give patients access to the products. We are also committed to supporting the government to develop the ecosystem, diagnostic infrastructure and tailor-made prevention and screening strategies.
Mehedi Hasan/Dhaka TribuneIn Bangladesh, physicians and government stakeholders are following what is happening around the world in terms of regulation and in terms of new innovations. I think people, governments and stakeholders now know much more than before. I think this collaboration is very critical and helps treat patients as well as to get better treatments, and that is what we want to achieve.
DT: According to the World Health Organisation, there are 1.5 million cancer patients in Bangladesh with 10% of them dying each year. Accessibility and affordability of healthcare remains a key challenge to the cancer care plan in Bangladesh. Is there anything your company can offer in dealing with these challenges?
I think the most important thing about cancer is if you start early enough to take preventive actions and create awareness, then you can minimize your risks. The key to fight against cancer is actually prevention, and that means to bring the patients to a point that they do not need products to survive. This is why awareness campaigns are important and this is what we do.
Also, patients need to do some practice to prevent the disease. You can prevent it a lot if you go early to the doctors, listen to your body, not to be over reactive, but to just check the health aspects. If you can ensure early detection, you can live for many more years than by doing nothing.
The patients must come to physicians early and open up for testing. This is one of the things that we try to help governments with, but it also has to come from patients to show openness.
Cancer is not something that people want to talk about, they think it's taboo. We need to be open to that and do some testing to prolong your life.
DT: What is Roche doing to innovate in pricing and its business model to serve more patients?
We have established international differential pricing, which provides a framework for aligning prices to a country's GDP. This has been an effective solution to addressing affordability constraints of a specific country.
DT: There has been some visible progress in cancer treatment in Bangladesh over the past decades. The government has taken up an initiative to set up specialized cancer hospitals in all eight divisions of the country. What more initiatives can the government take up and is there anything in which you can collaborate?
First, I applaud the government for taking such a decision to build new cancer treatment centres. That is a great undertaking of the government. Now the government needs to prepare a fund for oncology so that everybody really has access to treatment. We are committed to act side by side with the government to help make the project successful and support their endeavours.