CoaguChek is rounding up its service range for professionals and patients with a re-launch of the internet presence www.coaguchek.com. Questions around the issue of coagulation (PT/INR) monitoring and CoaguChek will be answered on the newly designed and user-friendly internet pages of CoaguChek. Comprehensive service features offer practical information for both healthcare professionals and patients, but also for interested parties.

Coagulation self-monitoring gives patients who have to live for instance with mechanical heart valves or atrial fibrillation a higher quality of life, security and independence. However, due to lack of information and fear about their ability to manage it, coagulation self-monitoring is not performed by all patients that could use it. It also is difficult for healthcare professionals to satisfy the patients` information needs because of limited time in the daily practice routine. Therefore, Roche Diagnostics GmbH has now overhauled its internet presence of CoaguChek in form and content. Both healthcare professionals and patients get detailed answers around coagulation self-monitoring with CoaguChek.

The new internet presence of CoaguChek with the web address www.coaguchek.com is now more user-friendly and its overall look is now aligned with the appearance of CoaguChek materials. The new internet presence emphasizes background information on coagulation monitoring in general and the respective Roche Diagnostics` devices as well as comprehensive service features.

For healthcare professionals (HCPs)

On their dedicated pages, HCPs get important and adequate professional information. Besides product details and demonstrations with animation and video, comprehensive online service like medical knowledge around coagulation, references to medical literature as well as information on training centres (country dependent) and events are offered. Corresponding pages provide contact possibilities for physicians, pharmacists, training facilities or other professionals.

For patients

This section characterized by appealing design and easy navigation provides patients and other potentially interested people with information about coagulation self-monitoring. The basic content is close to the professional target group; however, patients are addressed differently, in a for them more understandable way.

You can find comprehensive information for oral anticoagulant patients and related people, for example family members, friends or patients having to take oral anticoagulants that consider going for coagulation self-monitoring, in coordination with their physician.

Support by information material

Nowadays, quick and reliable information is getting more and more important for all people involved in oral anticoagulation. With this comprehensive information for patients, healthcare professionals are supported and disburdened in their daily consultations. Furthermore service features are offered to patients on the website, for example the info centre. For healthcare professionals specific service features like seminars on integration of INR training and many tips for further reading are available.

Altogether Roche Diagnostics provides from now on a more informative, more appealing and more user-friendly internet presence with this re-launch of www.coaguchek.com.

About Roche and the Roche Diagnostics Division

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is one of the world’s leading research-focused healthcare groups in the fields of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. As a supplier of innovative products and services for the early detection, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, the Group contributes on a broad range of fronts to improving people’s health and quality of life. Roche is a world leader in diagnostics, the leading supplier of medicines for cancer and transplantation and a market leader in virology. In 2005 sales by the Pharmaceuticals Division totaled 27.3 billion Swiss francs, and the Diagnostics Division posted sales of 8.2 billion Swiss francs. Roche employs roughly 70,000 people in 150 countries and has R&D agreements and strategic alliances with numerous partners, including majority ownership interests in Genentech and Chugai. Roche’s Diagnostics Division offers a uniquely broad product portfolio and supplies a wide array of innovative testing products and services to researchers, physicians, patients, hospitals and laboratories world-wide. For further information, please visit our websites www.roche.com and www.roche-diagnostics.com

All trademarks used or mentioned in this release are legally protected by law.

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For further information please visit us in the internet: www.coaguchek.com and www.roche-diagnostics.com or contact:

Marion Mischler

Diagnostics Communication

Phone: +41 (61) 688 2109

e.mail: marion.mischler@roche.com