New Cancer Products

Abstract

Worldwide markets for research-use and clinical immunodiagnostics (in vitro) utilized for cancer-patient testing will be approx $200 million (US dollars) in 1991 and are projected to exceed $500 million in 1996 (see Table 1). Today’s commercial products for cancer testing consist, for the most part, of monoclonalantibody-based reagents. Commercial DNA-probe products for cancer testing are just beginning to emerge. In vitro diagnostic cancer markets are growing at 20–25% annually and can be expected to continue to grow at this rate for at least the next five years. Even when the in vitro diagnostic product market for monoclonal-antibody-based cancer reagents exceeds $500 million in 1996, the emergence of an array of DNA-probe methods for cancer-patient testing will be just at the beginning of establishing a major clinical-laboratory market for DNA-probe cancer tests.