APR 2018
The Europe cancer biomarkers market is expected to register a CAGR of 12.2%, during the forecast period, 2018 to 2023. Biomarkers are chemical, physical, or biological parameters, which can be used to indicate disease states. Oncology biomarkers offers high speed, non-invasive cancer diagnosis and believe to enhance cancer detection and screening. Major driving factors for the market are streamlined drug delivery process, noninvasive technology, and increased rates of survival.
There has been a paradigm shift in healthcare, from diagnosis after the symptom has appeared to early diagnosis or risk assessment, especially in developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, and others. Cancer biomarker plays a pivotal role in risk assessment and early diagnosis. Biomarkers, particularly those associated with genetic factors, offer a quantitative way to determine when individuals are predisposed to some form of cancer. These biomarkers have been developed for almost all cancers with high prevalence rate. Some of the examples for such biomarkers are mutation on KRAS, p53, EGFR, erbB2 for colorectal, esophageal, liver and pancreatic cancer, and BRCA1 and BRCA2 for breast and ovarian cancer. The biomarker’s potential to assess the risk precisely has helped in improving the adoption for the technology, which has led to market expansion.
In cancer, it is widely accepted that the success of the treatment depends on the phase it is being diagnosed. Some even suggest the 80-20 formula, which indicates that if cancer has been diagnosed in stage 1, the success rate of treatment could be as high as 80%. This underlines the importance of early diagnosis. Biomarkers have the potential to improve the early diagnosis process significantly in terms of accuracy and efficiency. This capability of precise early diagnosis is one among the important reasons for the adoption of the technology and going to drive the market. The other factors, such as Increasing Usage in Drug Development are driving the European cancer biomarker market.
It is proposed that both tissue and blood should be profiled in parallel within the single cancer-specific platform. Blood is very useful as a starting point due to its ease of acquisition, the diversity of analytes it contains, and its practicality. Moreover, most disease-relevant biomarkers are expected to be at their highest concentration at relevant organs or tissues. The need for immediate processing, storage, and thawing of these specimens is another restraining factor for the cancer biomarker tests, because the viability of the cells is very important while performing different biomarker tests. The other factor, such as high cost of diagnosis and reimbursement issues is also hindering the growth of the market.
The Germany cancer biomarker market holds the largest market share in 2017 in Europe region followed by UK. Due to the presence of high quality healthcare system and the cancer prevalence rate is high in this country.
The major players include - Abbott Laboratories, Affymetrix Inc. (Thermo Fisher Scientific), Agilent Technologies, Hologic Inc., Roche Holding AG, 23andMe, Biomerieux, Celera Corporation (Quest Diagnostics) and Illumina Inc., among others.
