Frost and Sullivan survey possible new Next Generation Sequencing markets

Sequencing platform providers aim to develop tests for infectious diseases, particularly meningitis and respiratory diseases

The Transformational Health team of Growth Partnership Company, Frost and Sullivan, have completed a survey on changes to the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) market.

Thus far, NGS is a complementary technology. Potential NGS-based tests garnering attention include oncology-germ line mutation, somatic mutation, rare genetic disease testing and pharmacogenomic testing.

Senior Industry Analyst of Transformational Health, Divyaa Ravishankar, said:

“Most respondents indicated that they preferred outright purchases from the manufacturer for instruments and reagents.”

“Factors that will help the market take off include lowering overall pricing, consumables in particular; faster and deeper data analysis; and specific reimbursement, coverage, and coding measures.”

The 2016 Global Survey on Clinical Next-generation Sequencing analysed the market based on an online survey of a carefully selected group.

Key findings include:

• 51.6% respondents showed a keen interest in using NGS technology to develop assays for certain infectious diseases. Meningitis emerged as a top cited area followed by respiratory diseases
• 83% of the respondents indicated that NGS is still being used as a complementary technology. This is not expected to change in the next 3 years time frame until the technology matures
• 81.8% of the respondents perform bio informatics data analysis in-house, with a very few outsourcing to a third party vendor.

“In terms of genetic elements, the highest interest is in cancer biomarkers and studying oncogenes, followed by tumor suppressor genes and microRNAs,” noted Ravishankar.

Ambry Genetics, GeneDx, Invitae, and Baylor Miraca are emerging as companies to watch in this space, besides big US hospitals and reference laboratories such as ARUP, LabCorp and Quest, which received the highest rating in terms of brand familiarity.

Companies

• Frost and Sullivan