Biomarkers poised for growth, says Frost & Sullivan
Owing to their ability to shorten development time and decrease costs in the long term
Biomarkers have excellent growth potential owing to their ability to shorten development time and decrease costs in the long term, according to a report by Frost & Sullivan (F&S).
The business analyst's European Biomarker Analysis Market report reveals market revenues of US$694m in 2008 and estimates this will increase to US$2.2bn by 2015. This is an early growth stage market with significant potential, F&S says.
Biomarkers have a multitude of applications such as early disease detection, identifying potential drug targets, predicting patient response to medication and accelerating clinical trials. Along with its role in making personalised medicine a reality, this technology enjoys priority in terms of funding and investments.
But F&S says there is a lag between the discovery of biomarkers in the laboratory and commercialisation, owing to major roadblocks in biomarker validation and assay development. Target validation, high-throughput compound screening and lead discovery are processes that take place as a separate workflow whereas biomarker discovery, assay development and much later testing, are a parallel workflow. The union between these two workflows is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for biomarker testing to go mainstream. Only Big Pharma will be able to manage two parallel workflows for one drug development programme owing to the costs involved.
"Currently, biomarker testing is sporadic and mainly restricted to large biotech and pharma companies," said F&S senior research analyst Rasika Ramachandran. "Although the regulators are gradually mandating biomarker testing for widespread adoption by all tiers of biotech and pharma companies, most pharma companies need to find a way to converge the drug development workflow with the biomarker development workflow to facilitate cost-effective and accessible biomarker testing."
The integration of the workflows is happening and workable solution should be reached in the next five years or so.
So far, cancer biomarkers and cardiovascular biomarkers have the greatest growth among the disease areas, with central nervous system (CNS) biomarkers not far behind.
