Gene chip market tipped to soar

UK-based analyst Datamonitor has tipped a massive increase in the global gene chip market over the next four years, from $322 million in 2000 to $1.2 billion by 2006.

In a new report, The Virtual Genome: From Genes to Drugs via the Internet, the company says that gene chip technology could change the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and physicians, as genetic data could match patients with the drugs that are right for them.

"With genomics being the great hope for drug development by mapping diseases to genetic data, causal links can be found between genes, susceptibility, mutation and immunity," the report says. "Precise drug targets can be identified that will see marked improvements in efficacy and onset rates."

The report also says that if effective links are established between research teams, proteomics is likely to be a key future driver of communication technologies, as pharmaceutical companies look beyond genetic data as a basis for drug discovery.

But it also warns that the limitations of computer analysis are putting the aim of creating online genomic databases increasingly out of reach.

"As knowledge of genomics increases and the quantities of data available to drug developers grows, so the requirements to make sense of this information becomes more complex and the endpoint appears more distant," the report says.

The report focuses on the impact of IT and the Internet on genomic research. The main section of the report, 'Making Sense of the Genetic Code,' looks at the relationship between data potential and IT capacity. The two subsequent sections, 'Personal Medicine' and 'The Future Decoded' look at the future of the market and the impact of changing research capabilities on web technology. In the course of the analysis for The Virtual Genome, Datamonitor identified three key action points:

• Form collaborative links with the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C). By influencing the development of a single genomics technology platform, pharmaceutical companies can ensure that their individual needs are taken into account and can take early advantage of shared data.
• Review the potential return on investment offered by software communication systems. The pooling of research data and the ability to search across different forms of data will promote speed and reduce the risk of error.
• The emergence of personalised medicine, treatment regimens based on matching a patient's genes to drug interaction data, could open up new opportunities to pharmaceutical companies marketing products for niche indications in the future.