World biomarkers market will reach $29.25bn in 2018

Friday 30 August 2013, Amsterdam

A new report predicts the market for biomarkers will reach $29.25bn in 2018. That industry generated $16.23bn in 2012, and its revenues will show strong growth to 2023. That sales forecast and others appear in Biomarkers: Technological and Commercial Outlook 2013-2023, published in July 2013.

In 2012, biomarker discovery dominated that field. That sector is expected to face strong competition from another fast-growing submarket – biomarker diagnostics. This is owing to biomarkers increasingly being used in companion diagnostic tests. Also, biomarker diagnostics are being used to stratify patients in the clinic, to assess which patients will benefit most from treatments. This allows for more-personalised therapy. Biomarker services formed the smallest sector of the market in 2012, accounting for 7% of the market. However, more pharmaceutical companies are cutting cuts in their in-house research and development, and are outsourcing to contract research organisations (CROs). The biomarker services market is also achieving growth in the number of service providers and companies that provide technological advances in bioinformatics, genomics, metabolomics and transcriptomics to aid biomarker discovery, development and validation.

Pharma R&D is moving away from broad-spectrum therapies, towards targeted therapies for treating patients with defined disease subtypes. That refinement allows for more-efficient drug development, as biomarkers guide patient selection for clinical trials, as well as identify adverse events. Furthermore, efficacy biomarkers as surrogate endpoints in clinical trials enable companies to cut time needed for studies in therapeutic areas where standard trial endpoints take years to assess. Biomarker systems also enable companies to halt unsuccessful trials earlier.

Hemant Mistry, a pharmaceutical industry analyst, said: “Biomarkers play an important role in healthcare and will continue to do so, as pharma companies begin to seriously invest in the field. In addition, drug development continues to face challenges from increasing costs and rise in failure rates of candidates in clinical studies. To overcome these challenges, biomarkers are being used to aid the development of more- targeted therapies – personalised medicine – thereby reducing the risk of possible failure in the clinic.

“There is also significant merger and acquisition (M&A) activity occurring in the biomarker industry. This is because biomarker discovery and validation need a significant amount of expertise and access to specialised equipment, such as mass spectrometers and genomic sequencing technology. For this reason, companies limited in a particular field of research are forming partnerships – or acquiring companies – to trade and share expertise. Many pharmaceutical companies have signed collaboration and licensing agreements with biomarker developers, to gain access to disease biomarkers for use in drug and diagnostic development.”

This report gives revenue forecasts to 2023 at overall world market, submarket and national level. It forecasts world revenues for 11 biomarker submarkets:

• Discovery, diagnostics and services
• Genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and other applications
• Cancers, cardiovascular diseases, CNS disorders and other illnesses.

The study includes trends and revenue forecasts to 2023 for leading national markets. It analyses the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Spain, Italy (EU5), Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC nations). Also, the work shows interviews with other authorities on biomarkers – experts from the industry.