Abstract

Introduction for IVD customers’ needs

Johnson Zhang, Vice President And General Manager, PerkinElmer Asia Pacific

IVD techniques have been regarded as essential tools in medical practice. Driven by many key factors, including development of IVD technologies, increasing incidence of chronic diseases and growing awareness of public healthcare, IVD market is undergoing a period of rapid development and it will continue growing in the coming years. But the deficit of government budget and the control of medical insurance cost are restricting IVD market size. Many innovated techniques have been used in clinical practice, such as MS, GS, Microfluidics, and POCT. Those new techniques are changing and influencing customer need and habit when they provide higher-quality to customer. With different laboratory scale, geographic regions and testing items, there are different customer needs. There is an inevitable trend that producer’s development process should base on customer requirements and it is time to be changed from technique-driven to customer need-driven. Although there is diversity in IVD products, general speaking, customer’s needs present the trend of development from two directions including intensification and simplification. Intensification more tends to be automation, high throughput, rich menu and total solution, while simplification more tends to be smaller, integration, easy to use and portability. As miniaturization for chemistry, physics, biology, materials science and bioengineering, microfluidic technology has been widely admitted by customers as an important in-vitro diagnostic tool with the advantages of easy-to-use, high-efficiency, integration and portability, such as being used in proteomics, genomics and cytomics field and it will be more widely accepted by customer along with the development of the IVD industry.