10 DRUG DISCOVERY & DEVELOPMENT


Market focuses on high-speed, high-reproducibility arrays


Competition is fierce in the high-speed array market as 2009 sees a whole raft of new technologies launched onto the market. Sean Ottewell reports.


La concurrence est féroce sur le marché des analyses simultanées à grande vitesse alors que 2009 est le théâtre du lancement commercial de toute une série de nouvelles technologies. Un reportage de Sean Ottewell.


Angesichts der Tatsache, das für 2009 eine ganze Reihe neuer Technologien für den Markt angekündigt wurden, hat sich ein starker Marktwettbewerb entwickelt. Ein Bericht von Sean Ottewell.


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ach year, Frost & Sullivan gives a company of the year award that recognises outstanding management, consistent growth, and the ability to


offer high quality products and/or services as well as have a positive social and economic impact on local and national communities. The award also highlights exceptional customer service offerings and the expertise to take advantage of market changes by capturing and solidifying market presence, or execute of innovative strategies within the existing competitive landscape. Based on its recent analysis of the drug


discovery technologies market, this year’s recipient of the North American Frost & Sullivan company of the year award is Life Technologies. Formed from the combination of Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems, Life Technologies is on a clear path to become its own unique organisation with unparalleled efficiency and speed of operation. More importantly, the reengineered Life Technologies promises extraordinary revenue growth that far outpaces the performance of its two predecessor companies. “Prior to the 2008 merger, Applied Biosystems held the largest percentage of market share in the microRNA, PCR reagents, capillary electrophoresis sequencing, qRT-PCR, and life sciences mass spectrometry markets, while Invitrogen held the largest percentage of market share in the cell culture and protein expression and purification markets,” explains Jonathan Witonsky, Industry Manager, Drug Discovery & Clinical Diagnostics, Frost & Sullivan. “By merging, the new company, Life Technologies, holds a significant market share in nine additional market segments, including the nucleic acid purification and isolation market, the laboratory information management systems market, the cell-based assays market, the research ELISA market, the high content screening market, the liquid chromatography market, the protein electrophoresis market, the RNAi market, and the proteomics array market.” F&W says that a US$300 million


investment in research and development is likely to expand the company’s position in the burgeoning markets surrounding


advanced genomics, regenerative medicine, diagnostics, forensics, and environmental testing. For example, Life Technologies is building on its leading position in the capillary electrophoresis sequencing market by making a major play in next generation sequencing. By leveraging its Invitrogen brand of nucleic acid sample preparation technologies and Applied Biosystems brand SOLiD System for ultra-high throughput DNA sequencing, Life Technologies is expected to have a major role in bringing next generation sequencing to the medical realm. However, the company’s high-speed TagMan


OpenArray technology is facing fierce competition as other manufacturers launch their latest array systems.


One such company is Synbiosis, a


world-leading manufacturer of automated microbiological systems. The company has announced that its ProtoCOL automatic zone measuring system has new features, designed to improve the speed of analysing single radial immunodiffusion (SRD) plates. The ProtoCOL can generate results from a 16-


zone SRD plate of flu vaccines in minutes. This means scientists can analyse ten SRD plates in the time it would take to manually analyse one (Fig. 1).


Fig. 1. With ProtoCOL scientists can analyse 10 SRD plates in the time it would take to manually analyse one.


www.scientistlive.com


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