Trends on the clinical diagnostics marketplace horizon

Over the next few years, this market will show continuous--and molecular diagnostics exceptional--growth. A change in diagnostic dogma from caring for the sick to screening patients with no immediate symptoms will drive development of preemptive screening tests, generating new business and requiring automation due to large sample numbers. Transfer of new technologies into routine clinical testing and the availability of new therapeutics will support personalized medicine.

Global health-related influences and solutions

To maintain and improve health requires commercial solutions and public-health systems implementation. Our main focus is to quickly and reliably introduce cost-effective commercial solutions, enabling healthcare worldwide; thus, we actively form international partnerships with other companies, university research departments, and diagnostic laboratories or NGOs. National regulatory policies relating to health are becoming stricter, bringing new challenges to compliant hardware, software, and reagents development as well as addressing different levels of complexity linked to the absence of global harmonization standards. The positive impact of these efforts is that they raise global diagnostics standards.

Coming medical laboratory changes

Consolidation of medical-device and reagent manufacturers as well as clinical labs is significant. This favors stringent automation due to increasing throughput demands of larger service labs. To cope with such complex instrumentation, highly educated technicians need to continually expand their skill sets to encompass the know-how of, for example, lab engineers, software specialists, application scientists, and bioinformatics specialists. The implementation of new, complex multiparametric tests (e.g., genomic and expression arrays), which provide complex sets of patient data, will require significant efforts to train physicians to interpret such data. These efforts also will require expert system support for a range of different throughput scales.

Encouraging young people in diagnostics careers

We are currently facing a fascinating transfer of new technologies derived from genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics into clinical routine diagnostics. We rely heavily on well-educated and innovative specialists as well as teams of experts to develop, produce, and market competitive products. There are unlimited opportunities for young people to pursue careers in laboratory medicine and, more broadly, in the life sciences. Get the best possible training, and bring an open mind to your work.

By Mac Edwards, Associate Editor

RELATED ARTICLE: Gregory Porter

Professional

Joined Tecan, maker of Freedom EVO, Freedom EVOlyzer, and Genesis FE500, in August 1999, currently serves as Tecan's Genomics Market Manager, U. S. Iconix Pharmaceuticals, Virology, 1998-1999

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Education

BS, Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 1984; PhD, Biochemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, 1990

Postdoctoral Studies

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC, 1990-1994; University of North Carolina, Department of Biochemistry, Chapel Hill, NC, 1994-1998

Personal

Enjoys playing basketball, reading novels and other literature, and studying economics. Treasures exploring the world with his wife, Margaret, and their three children. Currently learning to ski with his daughter.