Roche to buy U.S. biotech firm Seragon for up to $1.7 billion

Roche Holding AG said it would pay up to $1.725 billion to buy Seragon Pharmaceuticals, a privately-held U.S. biotech company that researches breast cancer treatments. Roche has long dominated the field of breast cancer with drugs such as Herceptin and recently won approval for Kadcyla and Perjeta, two treatments for patients whose cancer cells contain increased amounts of the protein known as HER2. San Diego-based Seragon was spun out from Aragon Pharmaceuticals last year when that company was bought by Johnson & Johnson . Seragon is focused on developing a new generation of oral medicines that it believes offer an improved way of tackling hormone receptor-positive breast cancer, and potentially other cancers.