Protein biochips evolving from promise to products

According to the report, Protein Biochips: Parallelized Screening for High-Output Biology​, one of the key drivers that are likely to cause major shifts in this emerging market, are the methods used in accelerating the drug making process in the face of rising R&D costs.

Genomics and proteomics technologies have been enormously successful in finding changes in the expression of genes and proteins between normal and diseased tissue. In fact the successes in generating ever-increasing amounts of data give way to low-output methods for validation, creating a looming bottleneck.

The report identifies the widen of this bottleneck with higher output and higher throughput screening technologies citing the protein biochip as the key technology as an alternative to the traditional methods such as western blots and ELISAs. Researchers can then determine if changes in proteins are consistent and correlate with disease state and/or treatments.

Protein biochip systems, which appeared in 1990 with the launch of the first Biacore system, now account for 70 per cent of the protein biochip market. In 2003, this market was worth U.S.$170 million. By comparison, the worldwide market for DNA chip systems is estimated at close to U.S.$1 billion.

Biochip technologies are seen as the next logical step forward in drug R&D. Facing these near term product pipeline challenges, pharma companies have seen their R&D costs explode as delivery of new drugs have declined. Many of its current blockbuster drugs will reach patent expiry by 2005-2006 and draw competition from generic drug makers.

The growing number of pharma companies forming partnerships with biotechnology businesses makes good financial sense. Biotechnology companies have technologies to help the pharma companies produce and deliver more than one product, in a shortened time frame rather than in the current 10-15 year drug development process.

Accelerating the drug making process means turning to modern industrialization of R&D, using genomics and proteomics technologies, and other capabilities that biochip companies can provide.

The report also details the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of the biochip market from 2002 to 2008 estimated at 28 per cent with the majority of revenue coming from Biacore and Ciphergen as well as Luminex and its partners.

The report is compiled by pharmaceutical strategy consulting company, Bioperspectives​ and is available for $3,650 (€3000)