Chugai Website Disease Informative Content - "Health Kiosk"- Is Newly Published

December 19, 2005 (Tokyo) - Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (hereinafter, Chugai) [Main Office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo. President: Osamu Nagayama] announced today that it released Chugai "Health Kiosk" website, a Japanese edition of disease information site for lay people, "Health Kiosk," originally found on the website of its strategic alliance partner, F. Hoffman La-Roche Ltd. (hereinafter, Roche) [Head Office: Basel, Switzerland. Chairman and CEO: Franz B. Humer], as a part of an effort to improve and enhance Chugai website.

"Health Kiosk" is one of the disease informative content presented in Roche's corporate website, which explains "Definition", "Causes", "Predisposition", "Diagnosis", "Therapy", "Prevention" and "Facts worth knowing" of such diseases as "Cancer", "Osteoporosis", "Cardiovascular Disease", "Type 2 Diabetes", "Influenza", "Hepatitis C", "HIV/AIDS" and "Overweight" in laymen's terms exploiting summaries in texts and sound as well as movies including live-action and CG. This "Health Kiosk", now available in Japanese language, is newly published on December 19 in "Disease and Health" section in the top page of Chugai website (Japanese-only).

This "Health Kiosk" has so far been published and presented in English, German, French and Spanish on Roche's website. Adding this new Japanese edition, the program is now available in 5 languages.

Seeking for the best, Chugai has been reviewing the ways to properly provide healthcare and drug related information essential to realization of patient-centered medicine. In doing so, Chugai recognizes website has a great potential to become an effective informative tool and will continue to improve the content for lay people so information on diseases and the products which are beneficial to people including patients and their families will be easily accessible.

Please visit the following for "Health Kiosk" by Chugai and Roche.
Chugai website: http://www.chugai-pharm.co.jp/
Roche website "Health Kiosk": http://www.health-kiosk.ch/