Roche: Synthetic Vitamin C, Seveso Dioxin and the Stanley Adams Affair

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F. Hoffmann-La Roche was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1896 by Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, and in 1934 became the first company to mass produce synthetic vitamin C, sold as Redoxon. During World War II it moved its Jewish employees from Europe to the United States, while its factories in Germany and Poland used forced labor, including prisoners of war. In 1956 Roche researchers working on tuberculosis drugs created iproniazid, which failed against TB but lifted patients' mood and opened the antidepressant field, and in 1957 another Roche lab produced the first benzodiazepine, the class that includes Valium and Rohypnol. Roche bought the PCR testing patents in 1992, and in 1995 the FDA approved its HIV protease inhibitor saquinavir.

In 1976 a reactor at a plant in Seveso, Italy, owned by a Roche subsidiary, released a dioxin cloud. In 1973 executive Stanley Adams gave the European Economic Community documents showing a vitamin price-fixing cartel; when the documents were not redacted, Roche identified him, and Swiss police arrested him under industrial espionage law. His wife, falsely led to believe he faced decades in prison, took her own life. Roche pleaded guilty to the worldwide vitamin conspiracy in the United States in 1999 and paid a $500 million fine. It later bought Genentech for $46.8 billion and, in 2025, pulled the lymphoma drug Lunsumio from Switzerland after a pricing dispute.

• Within two years of saquinavir and similar drugs reaching the market, annual U.S. AIDS deaths fell from over 50,000 to roughly 18,000.
• In 2013 Roche repaid 3.2 billion Swiss francs to Swiss tax authorities over transfer mispricing.
• Acquisitions include Flatiron Health and Foundation Medicine in 2018, Spark Therapeutics and its $850,000 blindness gene therapy Luxturna in 2019, and Carmot Therapeutics in 2023.
• Lunsumio treats a rare lymphoma affecting about 24 patients a year in Switzerland and cost more than 7,000 Swiss francs per dose.
• Through bearer shares, the founding Hoffmann and Oeri families still hold slightly over half of Roche's voting rights.