Roche announces availability of cobas HBVassay for use on cobas 4800 System

Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced today the commercial availability of the cobas® HBVassay for use on the cobas®4800 System in countries accepting the CE mark. This new molecular diagnostic assay expands the available virology menu on the cobas® 4800 System, improving system efficiency and providing testing flexibility that allows physicians to assess a patient's response to antiviral therapy. The test will play a pivotal role in helping physicians and patients better manage disease caused by the hepatitis B virus.

"The state-of-the-art cobas® HBVassay enables clinicians to follow best practices in patient care with standardized viral load measurements, across a broad range of genotypes, with high sensitivity," said Paul Brown, Head of Roche Molecular Diagnostics. "Having the assay on the cobas® 4800 System helps laboratories provide reliable results for an expanded menu of assays--from microbiology and women's health to virology solutions-- in order to enable confident patient management."

The cobas® HBV assay is a test designed to detect the amount of hepatitis B virus circulating in a patient's blood and provides broad coverage of all known HBV genotypes (A-H), including pre-core mutations, with high sensitivity. To increase flexibility for patient sample management, the new test has two sample processing volumes.