UPDATE: Roche Sees Big Change From US Healthcare Reform Plans

Roche Holding AG (ROG.VX) Chairman Franz Humer said Tuesday he expects President Obama's plans to reform the U.S. healthcare system will bring sweeping changes, but he also expects Roche to be less affected than rivals by the anticipated changes.

Humer was speaking to shareholders at the company's annual general meeting in Basel, Switzerland.

"Healthcare reform will certainly result in a fundamental change of the dynamics of the U.S. market," Humer said. "We, with our strategy that focuses on innovative drugs rather than mass-market products, are markedly better positioned to cope with the changes than many of our competitors," he added.

Among the challenges for the drug industry, he included 'parallel' imports. A parallel import is a non-counterfeit product imported from another country without the permission of the intellectual property owner. While this is already a frequent practice in Europe, the U.S. market has so far been less exposed to it, Humer said.

He doesn't expect Roche to suffer much from this development, because the company's cancer products are - apart from foreign exchange rate effects - being sold at the same price in the U.S. as in Canada or Mexico.

Humer said he also expects generic copies of biotechnology products to become a reality in the U.S. Unlike Europe, the U.S. doesn't yet have a formal approval process for such drugs.

Biotechnology drugs are made from living cells, and therefore more complicated to replicate than traditional drugs, which are made with various chemicals.

Company Web site: http://www.roche.com

-By Anita Greil, Dow Jones Newswires; [phone] ; [e-mail]