Roche Holding AG (ROG) is focusing part of its pipeline on the riskiest area of drug development: the human brain. The Swiss drugmaker had its last top-selling brain therapy when Valium revolutionized anxiety treatment in the 1960s. Now Roche is betting it can use the tools that have since made it the world’s biggest maker of cancer drugs to penetrate the “black box” of Alzheimer’s and autism, Chief Executive Officer Severin Schwan said. “If you think back 15 years, a cancer tumor was like a black box,” Schwan said in an interview at the company’s Basel headquarters. “The brain has been a black box until recently. And now we start to understand what is happening on a molecular basis in the brain.”
