Current Opportunity and Future Potential of Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine, or matching an individual patient to an individual treatment, has long been part of diagnostic testing.

Matching a drug’s effectiveness with a patient’s genetics has been considered since the 1950s. Blood testing, transplant tissue testing, microbial identification, and antibiotic susceptibility (AST susceptibility) are examples of individualized testing that have been part of medicine for many years.

According to healthcare market research publisher Kalorama Information (Rockville, MD, USA), new validated biomarkers, and the need to improve target cancer therapy, increased personalized medicine testing to a USD 28 billion market in 2011.

A new report by Kalorama acknowledges that the current interest in in-vitro diagnostics (IVD), and that a share of the growth in this market, is coming from new molecular tests and the profiling of solid cancer tumors. These are creating an entirely new paradigm for diagnosing and choosing treatment options. The new tests are driving the market to better-than-average growth rates compared to other segments of the IVD market.

The primary growth drivers in the market are the discovery of biomarkers with clinical utility, as well as better reimbursement for testing. But as the author of the report, Shara Rosen, Kalorama’s lead diagnostic analyst, notes, it is recent technology improvements that are making the concept a reality.

“Cost-effective multiplex platforms, high powered software, assays using saliva, urine, and blood instead of biopsied tissue, these are the technological tools that make more sensitive and specific tests possible,” said Shara Rosen.

Healthcare delivery trends and novel therapeutics are refocusing on the role of laboratory medicine in disease management to the patient, by helping individualize diagnoses and treatments. Decentralization and wider availability of personalized medicine (PMx) tests can only happen with the conversion of lab-developed tests (LDTs) to CE Marked and the US Food and Drug Administration-cleared (FDA; Silver Spring, MD, USA) molecular testing methods.

In addition to analysis of tests currently on the market and in development, the Kalorama report also profiles key competitors in the market and discusses trends that are important for understanding this growth area of the diagnostic industry. It also profiles scores of companies that are involved in making tests for this market.

Kalorama Information, a division of MarketResearch.com, supplies the latest in independent medical market research in diagnostics, biotech, pharmaceutics, medical devices, and healthcare; as well as a full range of custom research services.

Related Links:
Kalorama Information
US Food and Drug Administration