From chemotherapy to biotechnology: the transformation of the cancer research pipeline at Hoffmann-La Roche

Abstract This paper analyses the history of the research and development pipeline for anticancer drugs at the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche from the 1950s to the early 2000s. I argue that the history of Roche’s oncology drugs exemplifies a major transformation in the pharmaceutical industry, from a chemistry-driven innovation model, relying predominantly on research in company-owned laboratories, developing chemotherapies for infectious diseases, towards one that is organised around molecular biology and collaborations with biotech companies and that appears to be targeting primarily cancer, employing relatively expensive biological compounds. While the shift to molecular biology and collaborations with biotech companies has received considerable attention from scholars of innovation, the majority of this literature deals with the early stages of this development. My case studies allow me to look at the impact of research on oncogenes and monoclonal antibody technology, which has been less extensively studied. I will look to programmatic publications by Roche’s Head of Research in the late 1980s and 1990s, Jürgen Drews, to contextualise this transformation. The case studies the paper discusses in detail are the histories of the anticancer drugs 5-Fluoro-Uracil (5-FU), classed as an antimetabolite and approved by the FDA in 1962, procarbazine (marketed as Natulan), another traditional chemotherapy drug that received FDA approval in 1969, and the monoclonal antibody compounds rituxan (marketed as Rituxan or Mabthera and approved by the FDA in 1997), trastuzumab (Herceptin, FDA approval in 1998), and bevacizumab (Avastin, approved by the FDA in 2004). While the developments mapped in this paper appear to illustrate a divergence of approaches in the development of antimicrobial and cancer drugs, they can also be read as a shift towards a new interpretation of an old paradigm: monoclonal antibodies as the ultimate magic bullets, that can also be employed to treat other conditions, including those caused by microbes.