Frost & Sullivan: In Vitro Diagnostics Market

A Market with High Potential as Diagnostics become Centre Stage and

Instrumental for the Move to Preventive Medicine

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, March 23 /PRNewswire/ -- While the in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) market is still very much focused among the Big Three: US, Europe and Japan, which constitute 90 percent of the 2007 global revenue, emerging countries such as India, Brazil and China are expected to become important stakeholders within the next few years.

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According to Frost & Sullivan Senior Consultant, Purna Dhara, "The global IVD market has shown a consistent growth of 6.72 percent annually, a trend that is expected to continue until 2012. Point-of-Care (PoC), the largest segment, is estimated to grow into an $18 billion USD market by 2012 and Molecular Diagnostics is fast becoming an important component as it registers a 15.4 percent growth annually."

At present, the majority of this market is monopolized by large companies but that will be expected to change as smaller companies with more innovative technologies enter the arena. The lab-on-a-chip (LOAC) technology, also known as DNA chip is one of them. The successful assimilation of LOAC technology would revolutionize the field of clinical diagnostics. While the standard infrastructure clearly defines the limitations between the healthcare practitioner and the laboratory personnel, LOAC technology may soon blur these lines.

LOACs are designed to increase the robustness of analysis and speed of delivery, allowing repeatability to simplify the process of diagnosis and screening of diseases. LOACs, which have the capability of combining multiple technologies on a single platform, are at present largely limited to the laboratory space but with the potential incorporation of process simplification as well as the other factors mentioned above, they are poised to penetrate the diagnostics market aimed at the full spectrum of opportunities including PoC.

LOAC may hold the key to the future of the IVD market. The global efforts on various genomic projects, including human and other organisms, continue to provide valuable genetic information and knowledge, thus advancing biotechnology product development, including new drug discoveries and IVD. The latter is more poised to benefit from these government funded genome projects as it does not need complicated functional genomics on these newly identified sequences as required by new drug discoveries.

"There is currently a need for an affordable, sensitive and rapid test, which is easy to perform, can be used in laboratories with very little experience or no experience in molecular biological methods - LOAC technology is positioned to address this gap. LOAC is perceived to provide faster results and has always been obtaining reliable and repeatable results. Other factors that will sustain growth in the LOAC technology market are rising lifestyle diseases, aging population, rising healthcare needs and consumer purchasing power," said Dhara.

Over and above the advantages listed here, the LOAC technology for diagnostic testing aims to bring together the different steps in a laboratory setting onto one chip. Because of the simplified process, even physicians can easily perform the tests at PoC, negating the necessity for sending samples to high-tech laboratories and waiting for days for the results. LOAC technology provides higher data quality, better controllable process parameters.

Dhara further elaborates, "The growth of IVD today stems largely from the rise of chronic and infectious diseases which will continue to play a very important role with the increase in the aging population. HIV continues to be an important indicator for growth of IVD as over 33 million patients continue to live with this virus. Other growth drivers in the IVD industry are the increasing health care spending in emerging markets, extending accessibility to more healthcare services and products and developing awareness of health and disease prevention."

About Frost & Sullivan

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    Contact:
    Emmie Kaur
    Corporate Communications - Healthcare, Asia Pacific
    DID: +603 6204 5913
    Email: emmie.kaur@frost.com

    Jasminder Kaur
    Corporate Communications - Healthcare, Asia Pacific
    DID: +65 6890 0937
    Email: jkaur@frost.com

SOURCE Frost & Sullivan