What are the therapeutic segments for clinical diagnostics?
Advances in genetics and proteomics have rendered more personalized treatments and better prognoses for patients. Over 4,000 diagnostic tests are available to diagnose, detect, treat and monitor a wide range of health needs. Six of the major focus areas include:
- Oncology
- Women’s Health
- Infectious Disease
- Cardio Metabolic
- Neurology
- Transplant Health
1. Oncology
Cancer screening, diagnostics, treatment selection and monitoring is a large segment of the overall clinical diagnostics market. Thus far, clinical diagnostics tests and imaging help doctors make better diagnoses but many tests shy away from “predicting” or providing a binary yes/no to whether a patient has cancer.
2. Women's Health
Pregnancy, fertility testing, prenatal testing, osteoporosis screening and cancer are market segments within women’s health. Areas of advancement across these segments (including in the areas of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT)) have improved how women’s health is treated.
3. Infectious Disease
Despite significant improvements in sanitation practices and medicine, the prevalence of infectious diseases like AIDS, HEP C and MRSA is considerably high. Companion diagnostics tests can accurately evaluate a patient’s condition and determine the best treatment plan for that particular patient.
4. Cardio Metabolic
Heart, liver and kidney health remains a strong focus for clinical diagnostic health with more tests coming online each year that provide more accurate information, earlier and in a non-invasive way.
5. Neurology
Managing the health of the brain has remained reactive and slow given the difficulty in understanding diseases and their mode of action combined with the potentially damaging nature of invasive testing. However, advances in liquid biopsies are making it possible to better understand neurodegenerative, neurodevelopment and other diseases of the brain.
6. Transplant Health
Typical testing to monitor transplant health has relied on tissue biopsies to understand rejection status. But these biopsies can often have the unintended effect of causing rejections – clinical diagnostic testing in this area can also be severely benefited from liquid biopsies.
By: Kiran Chin
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