As biochip technology makes the transition from ‘bench to bedside’ in the clinical trial processes, improved patient therapies will result. However, a poor reimbursement climate and budgetary restrictions is dampening adoption of chip-based diagnostic kits.
Targeting diseases and proving clinical utility coupled with multi-parameter testing will be critical to encouraging wider acceptance. says Frost & Sullivan.
Pharmacogenomics has fundamentally altered the dynamics of the diagnostics market by ushering in the concept of personalised medicine. Genomic technology promises to promote individualised treatment by uncovering how genetic inheritance triggers varied drug responses in people. Phenotypic diagnosis may gain some good rewards with regard to biochip technology applications, as morphological features will be used to determine the disease prognosis, as in the case of a tumour.
Identifying relevant disease specific markers holds the key to using these biochips in
real-time diagnostics. Diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s will provide the major impetus to implanting this chip technology within clinics.
However, while the emergence of personalised medicine has positively influenced the growth of array technologies in clinical diagnostics, the key obstacle lies in obtaining consistent and statistically relevant readouts. This is creating a need for easy to use systems equipped with robust infrastructure that are capable of providing consistent results in the clinical research phase.
Multi-parameter testing and miniaturisation of chip technology are also set to help physicians focus on higher-level decision making and drive uptake of chip technology in clinical research. Biochips offer the ability to identify and prioritise drug targets through the parallel corroboration of a multitude of gene expressions. Moreover, even as feature sizes shrink, the capacity to provide expanded information content is growing.
Supported by these trends, the US$14.1million European market for biochips in clinical research is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24.6percent over the period 2004 to 2011 to reach US$65.6million.
Protein chips are expected to have a higher growth potential than DNA chips in clinical research as most drug targets are proteins and post translational modifications can be avoided.
One of the key issues confronting both vendors and researchers are the high cost of chip-based solutions. Owing to the premium pricing of array-based diagnostic tools, the commercial use of biochip applications in clinical settings has lagged.
