Worldwide nucleic acid test market to reach $16 billion by 2010

The worldwide market for nucleic acid testing was worth over $1.5billion in 2000, or 8% of the total in vitro diagnostics market, but this is expected to reach a value of over $16 billion by 2010, says a new report from Front Line Strategic Management Consulting.

NAT has been around since 1985 and has been mostly used for diagnosing infectious diseases, where the DNA sequence for the target organism is known, the report notes. The introduction and commercialization of technologies, such as the polymerase chain reaction amplification procedure and the fluorescence in situ hybridization detection technique, have allowed NAT to advance into other fields, such as identity (mostly paternity and biological forensics) and prenatal testing. These are two fields that are switching from their traditional methods to those that use NAT, it adds.

Front Line suggests that the segments that will now benefit most from NAT are cardiovascular and oncology. Cardiovascular will benefit because it is the leading cause of death and more research is done in that area than in any other, and oncology due to the nature of the disease (uncontrolled proliferation of cells), which lends itself to nucleic acid testing. The compounded annual growth rates for NAT in these two indication segments is estimated at 92% and 37%, respectively.