Market and technology trends in IVD

In vitro diagnostics (IVD), is of utmost importance in the global healthcare because today >70 percent of medical decisions are made on the results of IVD testing. Using the evaluation of specimens taken from the human body, IVD is utilized to diagnose disease. In the light of these facts, IVD is the highest-revenue segment of the medical device market, valued in the multi-billion-dollar range. Market segments for the IVD include instruments, reagents, and software related to diagnostics. The rapid market growth of IVD technologies, as well as certain trends, has spurred medical device makers to continue expanding their portfolio of innovative clinical solutions.

Industry trends like rapid disease diagnosis, ease of use, personalized patient care, and use of advance analytics are pushing the IVD manufacturers to expand current base, and to pursue work for developing new technologies. The disciplines, which are most heavily influenced by these trends, are like POC testing, clinical chemistry, immunodiagnostics, and molecular testing.

Higher prevalence of chronic diseases due to deskbound life style, poor eating habits, increased alcohol and drug abuse has increased the number of chronic lifestyle diseases, which are another factor that triggers the expansion in IVD technologies.

Frequent occurrence of infectious diseases, which affects large population, acceptance of personalized care and desire for fast, easy-to-use solutions for diagnoses are equally important factors for innovations and enhancement of diagnostic methodologies.

With patients’ growing acceptance of more personalized diagnostics and the improved turnaround time for DNA testing results, the technology used to analyze biomarkers in the genome and the proteome has moved to the foreground in the past few years. Molecular diagnostics has a wide range of applications – from the identification of infectious diseases to oncology to the predictions of immune function and which drugs work best for a given disease.

With enhanced burden of cancer, biopsy, which is considered to be the forefront tool in diagnosis, has also moved to a new arena of liquid biopsy, which detects disease biomarkers in simple liquid specimens, such as blood or CSF. This provides greater relief to the patient for avoiding pain of removing tissue of cells for laboratory analysis. This novel technology has been proven to be more effective in conditions like non-small-cell lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and a few more such cancer conditions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) are being rapidly incorporated in IVD segments. AI brings advanced data analytics and reduction of errors to IVD devices. IoT technology backed by AI assists in remote monitoring and management of devices and device efficiency during their downtime.

Rising demand, improving healthcare infrastructure in the developing world and, the shift from curative to preventive healthcare for chronic and lifestyle diseases would be the growth drivers for IVD business in the next decade.

The most significant market trend during 2020 was the origin and global spread of COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus. Originating in late 2019, the virus quickly became a global pandemic. Diagnostic manufacturers quickly developed and approved tests for the virus, which overwhelmed all other activities during 2020.

Increased demand due to growing awareness has helped IVD industry to flourish in recent years. Amongst the geographical segments, India, China, and Latin America ae poised to grow in double-digit rates in the coming decade, giving enormous opportunities in the IVD industry.

In India, last two decades have brought importance of diagnostics in the forefront – the major drivers being increased awareness, new diseases, increase in lifestyle diseases, and affluence which increases affordability.

India still is largely dependent on import of testing material, especially equipment. However, many biochemistry and hematology reagents are now manufactured in India. There is wide scope to expand manufacturing equipment and sophisticated tests and we are sure to witness these opportunities being exploited.

Also, India will witness the market being more and more regulated and increase of insurance coverage, which will expand the testing markets further.