BIOCHIPS MARKET ANALYSIS

The high cost associated with biochip analysis can hamper the global biochips market growth. Biochip analysis requires expensive laboratory equipment, reagents and specialized research personnel, which makes the overall process quite costly. For example, initial set up and installation of a basic biochip analyzer can cost over US$ 100,000 and each experimental run on such equipment can be expensive. This heavy capital investment and operating expenses associated with biochip analysis makes it unaffordable for many small laboratories and research institutes especially in developing regions of the world. The high costs impose significant financial barriers and hurdles for widespread commercialization and clinical adoption of biochip technologies. Many diagnostic and genomic applications that could benefit from the high throughput analysis enabled by biochips are not viable due to the high per sample testing costs. Private healthcare providers are reluctant to invest in expensive biochip equipment as the return on investment may take significant time period. Patients also hesitate to opt for advanced but costly biochip diagnostics tests when equivalent options are available at lower prices through other conventional methods. Several startups and small biotech companies working on biochip-based solutions find it challenging to achieve economies of scale due to the high setup and operational expenses of initial prototyping.

Market Opportunities: Integration of biochips with microfluidics

The integration of biochips with microfluidics has the potential to significantly advance the global biochips market. Biochips combined with microfluidic technologies allow for complex biochemical reactions and analyses to be carried out in extremely small fluid volumes. This enables high-throughput molecular assays and analyses to be performed rapidly at the point-of-care. By miniaturizing full diagnostic labs onto a single chip sized device, microfluidic-biochip integration can make precision medicine more accessible and affordable worldwide. These lab-on-chip technologies could enable portable, easy-to-use, rapid and economic testing and screening for conditions like infectious diseases and chronic illnesses. Current research and development in this area aims to develop personalized disease screening, monitoring and drug response testing using saliva or blood samples of just microliters in volume. For instance, ongoing projects by NIH in 2021 are developing microfluidic-biochip devices capable of simultaneously detecting over fifty biomarkers from a single finger-prick of blood to comprehensively screen for heart disease and cancer risk. Such minimally invasive multi-analyte testing would prove transformative for healthcare especially in low-resource settings. It could facilitate widespread population-level screening campaigns and enable early detection when treatment options are most effective.