Roche’s chief executive has said the UK has not invested enough in healthcare and testing infrastructure in recent years — leaving it to lag behind other countries and hindering its response to coronavirus.
The Swiss company is one of the diagnostics “big four”, providing molecular tests that look for the presence of the virus using so-called “high throughput” machines, which can process many tests in short amounts of time.
“You cannot just start a lab on a greenfield,” Severin Schwan, Roche’s chief executive, said on Wednesday, as he gave a first-quarter trading update.
“One of the learnings of this crisis is you see some of the countries who have invested in healthcare, in testing infrastructure over the last [few] years, such as certain countries in Asia, [like] Singapore, or, say, South Korea. Or, if you look in Europe: Germany, Switzerland,” he said. “Those countries now have a huge advantage.”
“And then you have other countries who underinvested in healthcare infrastructure, but now it shows,” he said.
“There are certain regions in the UK where there is no single high throughput platform,” Mr Schwan went on to say. “In Switzerland, there are 20.”
The UK government has gradually expanded testing and aims to reach a rate of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April — but only carried out just over 18,000 on Tuesday. The blame game over testing failings has already begun.
Roche said bottlenecks in testing were down to the lack of infrastructure, rather than a lack of tests, but noted that the UK had made advances in the past few weeks. There has been a “lot of co-operation with authorities, so they should get some credit for what they’ve done”, said Mr Schwan.
“The UK and other governments are under enormous pressure,” he said. “To a certain degree nobody could really foresee that and they’re really working hard.”
He added Roche was installing new testing infrastructure in the UK and that this “was only possible” because the government supported it.
Roche is planning on launching an antibody assay next month — potentially enabling authorities to understand whether millions have already had the disease or not. The company is also testing its Actemra drug as a potential treatment for disease caused by coronavirus.
Mr Schwan’s comments came as Roche released results for the first quarter, reporting a 7 per cent increase in group sales at constant currencies. Zurich-listed shares edged 1 per cent higher in early morning trade.
Roche does not report profit figures in the first quarter. The company affirmed its outlook for 2020, targeting a sales growth in the low to mid-single digit range.
