"Diagnostics - More important than ever, but there's still a way to go".
Diagnostics are clearly improving and enabling better clinical decisions to be made, especially in oncology where mutation detection is enabling much more personalised approaches to treatment. There is still a long way to go, but combinations of diagnostics tests and technologies (beyond genomics) are giving a more detailed picture on which to base treatment decisions.
Just the other week, it was announced that Illumina had acquired GRAIL (subject to approval from the regulators), a company it
formed in 2016 and spun out. Illumina retained a 12% stake in the business and has decided the time is now right to bring it back
into the fold. History repeats itself in that the deal took place (as with most diagnostics) at a point at which the technology was in market, or at least market ready. The GRAIL, Galleri diagnostic test, is available as a CLIA waived test to detect 50 different cancers before symptoms appear. The test is yet to be FDA approved or reimbursed and currently costs just under $1000, but this milestone achievement, off the back of more than $2B in investment and a research effort that covered more than 100,000 people, was
sufficient to make Illumina want to pay around $8B to reacquire the business.
This White Paper published by PharmaVentures analysies the dynamic of the diagnostics market in light of the recent deal activity.
It is available to dowaload for free here