Harshad Bhanushali, Product Manager- Instruments, DiaSys Diagnostic India, gives an insight on the PoCT market in India which is going to witness a phenomenal growth
The point-of-care testing (PoCT) market has steadily increased over the last 40 years since its widespread introduction. This growth is likely to continue by the virtue of changes in healthcare delivery which are aimed at delivering less costly care closer to the patient’s home.
PoCT testing is generally performed by technology, first devised more than two decades ago. These have undoubtedly been refined and improved to deliver easy-to-use devices with incremental improvements in analytical performance.
PoCT devices can be divided into two categories.
The first is small handheld devices, providing qualitative or quantitative determination of an increasing range of analytes. These use biosensor strips and lateral flow strips with immobilised antibodies that bind to the analyte detected by reflectance or fluorescence spectrophotometry.
The second category of devices are larger bench-top devices, essentially the laboratory instruments, reduced in both size and complexity. These include critical care analysers and more recently, small haematology and immunology analysers.
New emerging PoCT devices include those that utilise molecular techniques such as PCR to provide infectious disease testing in a sufficiently small device. This area is likely to grow with many devices being developed and reaching the commercial market in the next few years.
Data on the growth of molecular testing market in PoCT is interesting in the context of increase in infectious disease testing. The total molecular diagnostics market is believed to be worth $4 billion in 2011 and will grow to $7 billion by 2016 with a compound annual growth rate by more than 18 per cent.
With the emergence of new devices to perform molecular testing at the point of care and the well-documented needs for more infectious disease testing in the developing world, it will be interesting to see the growth that takes place in PoCT.
Yet, there are areas where new technologies are needed in order to deliver the required analytical performance. PoCT devices that use PCR to detect a number of different pathogens are just starting to appear and in the next few years, we are likely to see a number of these reach commercialisation and be used in healthcare markets.
Given that, the analytical performance of these devices is well proven. The remaining challenge will be to see if they can be produced at a price which will enable them to have an impact on dealing with infectious disease in developing countries.
QDx Instacheck, marketed by DiaSys Diagnostics India is a table top PoCT device based on sandwich immune-detection method used for analysis of various analytes such as hormones, Sepsis (PCT), C-RP, Micro albumin, Cancer markers and Cardiac markers.
Quantitative results in 3-15 minutes, convenient to use, minimum training, very low maintenance and using universal sampling (WB/ Plasma/ Serum) are some of the attributes that make QDX Instacheck a powerful and superior PoCT analyser.
Contact Details:
Website: www.diasys.in
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