Business Diagnostics

In addition, convenience-based methods, although often not as fast, represent important improvements in ease of use and reproducibility of results for routine testing often in a unskilled laboratory environment. In response to these improvements, there has already been a sizable migration from the slower, traditional methods to these newer methods (see Fig.2).

What is “Rapid Micro?”

One thing that is a bit confusing, given the claims in the market, is what is meant by “rapid” microbiology. The term, as currently used in industrial diagnostics, is a bit of a misnomer. To keep it simple, at SCI we define rapid to mean any method that is non-traditional.

In launching new products and technologies to replace traditional methods, diagnostic companies sometimes have referred to their tests as rapid methods. Their use of this terminology has generally been driven by the time it takes for a phase of the test protocol, rather than the total time it takes, to get a result.

To us it seems inappropriate to refer to a test as rapid when it actually takes 24 hours or more to get actionable results, even if this test is more rapid in terms of on-time to set up, process and read than the corresponding traditional method it is replacing.

Until we get to desired performance the market truly wants, perhaps we should refer to this as “more” rapid microbiology.

Aggressive Adoption by Market

Regardless, the industrial diagnostics market has been aggressively adopting these newer tests. In 2003, approximately 20 percent of all microbiology testing was carried out using rapid methods. This means that of the over 1.1 billion tests that comprised the industrial microbiology market in 2003, 230 million tests were performed using newer methods. This volume has grown significantly in recent years.

Looking forward, by 2008, over 30 percent of all testing is forecast to be performed using rapid methods. With the growth in the size of the testing market (anticipated overall to rise by almost 370 million tests to total 1.5 billion tests in 2008) rapid tests will double to 460 million tests, representing a 15 percent growth in the volume of rapid tests used each year (see Fig.3).

Rapid tests almost always carry a price premium on a price per test basis versus the test being replaced. As a result, the market value of the rapid testing will increase in percentage terms even faster than the unit growth in test volume.

As mentioned earlier, the industrial diagnostics market has six key sectors; food processing, beverages, pharmaceutical, personal care products, environmental water and process water. The relative penetration of rapid microbiology methods by sector is illustrated in Fig.4.

The food processing and environmental water sectors have been the quickest to adopt newer or “rapid” methods. The food processing sector represents almost 50 percent of testing in the industrial market. Driven by economic issues, regulatory requirements, consumer pressure, the press and proactive practices, the food industry has been quickest to move towards alternative methods and away from traditional microbiology.

An important question is why hasn’t there been more adoption of these newer methods. Also, why is there such variation across the sectors? What are the restrictions or resistances? In addition, is there a variation of adoption practices across different geographies? These and other questions will be covered in future articles.

REFERENCE

Industrial Microbiology Market Review-2nd Edition, Strategic Consulting, Inc., March 2004.

Tom Weschler is president of Strategic Consulting, Inc. and former president of Idexx’s Food & Environmental Division. Reach him at 802-457-9933 or [email protected].