Roche Opens World's Largest PCR-Manufacturing Facility

Roche have opened a new manufacturing center in Branchburg, New Jersey, USA. The facility is the largest Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) manufacturing site in the world and was constructed to manufacture and supply Roche Diagnostics’ industry-leading products based on its Nobel-prize winning PCR technology. Roche has spent more than 150 million US dollars for construction of the new structure and renovations to the existing facility. The new plant allows Roche Diagnostics to consolidate the production currently operating in various places in New Jersey to one centralized Branchburg location. The new 26,000 square meter facility will employ up to 800 people, creating approximately 350 new jobs. Foundational work on the new facility began in April 2003.

In Branchburg, Roche Molecular Diagnostics, a business area of Roche Diagnostics with its headquarters in Pleasanton (California), produces PCR kits for the research, diagnostic and blood screening markets. The diagnostic kits are used for the detection and quantification of infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as for blood screening, including the West Nile Virus kit. The production range also includes reagents for a variety of diagnostic platforms, including microarray technology used in AmpliChip Tests. Overall, Branchburg produces approximately 140,000 kits per month, which are distributed worldwide.

Over the last four years, Roche Diagnostics has seen a 46 percent increase in production volumes of their test kits. As an example, in the blood screening business alone, where Roche Diagnostics’ PCR-based tests are used to screen more units of blood worldwide than any other nucleic acid test, their test kits have been used to test more than 100 million blood donations.