Roche Generosity Supports Organ Donation
$10,000 Gift is Pivotal to Asian Awareness Campaign
Oakland, Calif., August 29, 2005 – To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the launch of a significant transplant medicine and the 100th anniversary of the company’s presence in the United States, Roche donated $10,000 to the California Transplant Donor Network to support its Asian community outreach efforts. The medicine is a potent immunosuppressant called CellCept® (mycophenolate mofetil). Now the leading transplant medicine in the world, it was discovered and developed by scientists at the Roche campus in Palo Alto.
As part of its anniversary celebration, Roche presented the grant to Cathy Olmo of the Transplant Network and launched a donor awareness campaign for its 1,000 employees in Palo Alto. With the funding from Roche, the Transplant Network will begin an Asian American education campaign using paid media. The objective is to boost donation rates among Asian Americans - specifically the Chinese and Filipino communities - living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“We want to reach these two communities because they represent the largest sub-group with the lowest consent rates among the Asian population,” said David Heneghan, Public Affairs Manager of the California Transplant Donor Network. “This generous gift enables us to deliver a multi-faceted media campaign to increase awareness, trust, and comfort in the organ donation process.”
According to Heneghan, previous research and outreach experience suggest that the key barriers to increasing consent rates among the Asian community are low levels of awareness of organ donation; lack of familiarity with the Transplant Network as the “local face” of organ donation; and finally, a general discomfort in talking about death and dying.
Fast Facts
More than 88,000 people in the United States are waiting for organ transplants to save their lives. Over 2,300 of them are children under 18. As of April 2005, 8,400 of these men, women and children are in the Transplant Network’s Northern and Central California service area.
Each day, more than 17 people – one every 90 minutes – die in the United States because of a shortage of organ donors. About 13 people are added to the national organ transplant waiting list every day.
One person can save more than seven lives through organ donation, and touch more than 50 others with tissue donation. To become a donor, go to donateLIFEcalifornia.org. At this website one can both officially record their wishes to be a donor and notify their family.
About California Transplant Donor Network (www.ctdn.org)
The California Transplant Donor Network saves and improves lives by facilitating organ and tissue donation for transplantation. The Transplant Network helps 160 hospitals in 40 Northern and Central California and Northern Nevada counties offer the option of organ and tissue donation to families whose loved ones have died, coordinates deceased organ recovery and placement, and provides public education with the hope that every resident will become a donor. It is federally designated as this area’s organ recovery organization. For more information, visit ctdn.org or call 1-888-570-9400.
About Roche (www.roche.com)
Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is one of the world’s leading research-intensive healthcare groups. Its core businesses are pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. As a supplier of innovative products and services for the 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 number one in the global diagnostics market, the leading supplier of medicines for cancer and transplantation and a market leader in virology. In 2003, the Pharmaceuticals Division generated 19.8 billion Swiss francs in prescription drug sales, while the Diagnostics Division posted sales of 7.4 billion Swiss francs. Roche employs roughly 65,000 people in 150 countries and has R&D agreements and strategic alliances with numerous partners, including majority ownership interests in Genentech and Chugai.
About Roche Palo Alto (http://paloalto.roche.com)
Roche has 1,000 people on its Palo Alto campus, which is located adjacent to Stanford University in California’s Silicon Valley. It is one of five global Roche research centers. Scientists at Roche Palo Alto are focused on the discovery of new medicines to treat central nervous system, genitourinary, viral, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases and to support organ transplantation. Medicines discovered on the Roche Palo Alto campus include CellCept® (mycophenolate mofetil) for the prevention of renal, cardiac and hepatic organ transplant rejection, Valcyte® (valganciclovir) for the treatment of cytomegalovirus (CMV) in patients with AIDS and prevention of CMV disease in kidney, heart and kidney-pancreas transplant in high risk patients and Aleve®, a naproxen-sodium based over-the-counter pain reliever.
