Pandemic Expected to Create Greater Capacity for Diagnostic Testing

There are some bright sides to the COVID-19 pandemic, believe it or not. 

And one of them is an increased capacity for in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) testing. Once the pandemic subsides, countries will be left with an increased capacity for IVD testing, including clinical-grade genomic sequencing utilized to diagnose complex diseases such as cancers, claims GlobalData. The data and analytics company notes that diagnostic tests for metabolic disorders (cholesterol) and other infectious diseases (hepatitis, HIV) will also contribute to IVD demand as COVID-19 testing declines.
 
“Even though there will be a reduced need for COVID-19 diagnostic testing, IVD remains a focus for product development due to its quick and reliable results, ease of use, breadth of application, and scale-up potential,” said Ashley Clarke, a medical analyst at GlobalData. “As such, IVD devices will increasingly be used for early diagnosis to improve outcomes, and may also find importance in home settings, as part of a more sophisticated preventative medicine strategy. GlobalData estimates that IVD will account for 25% of all medical devices in development through to 2025.”
 
The medical devices sector will increasingly focus on cancer as an indication, growing from 9% of pipeline devices in 2019 to more than 21% in 2025, according to GlobalData’s Pipeline Products Database. The product pipelines for cardiovascular and nervous system diseases will each grow by 3% between 2019 and 2025, while orthopedic devices will severely decline in development (from 18% in 2019 to 8% in 2025).
 
“Many countries paused elective surgeries during the pandemic to conserve healthcare resources and focus on more urgent procedures, leading to a huge loss in revenue for therapy areas such as orthopedics,” Clark noted. “Many companies are still looking to make up lost revenue from those delayed procedures, and some markets have seen a loss rather than a delay in revenue as some patients have since become inoperable. The pandemic has also resulted in pipeline indications changing and could represent the industry shifting away from easily disrupted, elective procedures like hip and knee replacements in favor of procedures not so easily disrupted like ruptured aneurysm repair or trauma surgeries, especially considering the looming threat of a global recession.”
 
The pandemic made the average person familiar with lateral flow assays, broadening the application of point-of-care testing to outside of traditional healthcare settings. It’s also possible the pandemic helped new molecular diagnostic technologies, such as CRISPR, gain wider acceptance in healthcare, when they were not able to achieve so in previous public emergencies, such as with the West African Ebola epidemics.
 
“There is still an urgent need to address the pent-up demand for treatments that were delayed during the pandemic. Improvements in diagnosis, interventions, and patient care will help to mitigate this serious challenge,” Clark said.