Singapore, Jan 11, 2008: Cell-based diagnostics with applications in hematology, histology, cytology, microbiology, and transplant medicine generated more than $6 billion in revenues last year, and new and innovative enabling technologies are emerging that will propel certain segments of the market forward at double-digit rates, according to a new report released by Kalorama Information.

 

The new study, ‘Cell-Based Diagnostics: Technologies, Applications, and Markets, 2nd Edition,’ evaluates the market for both traditional technologies such as hematology, flow cytometry, and traditional stains, as well as increasingly sophisticated molecular techniques and the emerging areas of rare cell event testing, microarrays and beadarrays. These new technologies and digital arrays carry the advantage of being well suited to feed data to software designed to interpret array patterns and create the test result.

 

These innovations and new methods for genotyping biopsied tissue could revolutionize the treatment of a number of diseases, including: diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases and could lead the way to an era of individualized patient therapies using techniques such as microarrays, biochips, PCR and in situ hybridization.

 

"The potential for these technologies is huge. In fact, while our current market evaluations are based on commercialized assays and reagents, there is also a vast menu of in-lab developed, or 'home-brew' tests using tissue stains, flow reagents, antibodies, molecular probes and dyes marketed by scores of companies, worldwide. As the science of cell diagnostics is perfected, many of these tests are going main stream as authorized test services or market cleared tests," said Ms Shara Rosen, analyst for Kalorama Information and the author of the study.