Our Latest Report on Next-Generation Sequencing Finds Brisk Vendor Sales, but also Users With Unaddressed Needs
The DNA sequencer market has continued to provide powerful tools that hold the promise of bringing major changes to healthcare in the near future. In the last decade, explosive growth has occurred in terms of product introductions, new applications, and the end-user labs rushing to participate in these new areas. It is a 4 billion dollar market, but that doesn’t mean every system over is completely satisfied and/or isn’t looking out for a new model to purchase.
This was the finding our Next-Generation Sequencing Market and Kalorama Survey of NGS Laboratories. The report was both a secondary market analysis effort and a survey of laboratories. There is a 4 billion-dollar market for sequencing, according to Kalorama Information’s research. With a sizeable portion, over 12% of that demand in China.
According to the report, the ongoing technological advances are still enabling a Moore’s Law type of phenomenon in relation to the performance of the systems, although the consumables costs are dropping less rapidly. A lot of the structural change in labs appears to have slowed down, as the scientific and medical advances are being produced gradually.
Kalorama’s study aimed to identify some of the key trends taking place with both next-generation systems and capillary sequencers in relation to their usage in labs, and in relation to the sequencing of clinical samples for diagnostic or clinical research purposes.
The study focuses on a survey of 70 laboratories which was carried out from March to July of 2019. The survey effort targeted labs with some likelihood to be doing, or to be planning, applications of sequencing in either diagnostic or clinical research settings in the future. This is not straightforward to determine beforehand, as there are many different factors that drive a lab to consider diagnostics.
Among the findings of the survey:
- Most labs think their sequencing volume growth will grow between 1-20%. Resequencing/ targeted
- mRNA-seq / transcriptome were among usages demonstrating an increase.
- Labs mix models There was a trend for instance to have one Miseq, one Nextseq or NovaSeq, and one Hiseq. This combination provides the range of run time and throughput that gives the lab as much flexibility as possible.
- MiSeq was the commonly owned model in the survey, followed by next Seq
- Respondents want to reduce costs of systems first. The next priority is improving sample prep.
- Libarary preparation remains a key concern of labs, a key bottleneck.
- Sanger Sequencing is present at many sites along next gen systems though labs with a large amount of NGS models tended to minimize the Sanger
Customers also revealed purchasing plans and bottleneck areas where they’d like improvements. Scores of questions were addressed in the report. Kalorama’s report is available at: https://kaloramainformation.
