Organ-On-Chip Market
Healthcare Services

Pharmaceutical Companies Are The Dominant End Users Of Organs-On-Chips

Pharmaceutical companies are currently and are likely to remain the dominant end-users of organs-on-chips, because OOC technology offers tremendous potential for predicting side effects and efficacy and for hugely decreasing the cost of drug testing. That is partly because of the weaknesses of the current drug test methods. According to the US National Institute of Health (NIH), 30 % of drugs fail during clinical trials because they prove to be too toxic despite promising results from animal models. Thus many top pharmaceutical companies like Janssen (Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary), AstraZeneca, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and Roche are building collaborations with key organ-on-chip players. These companies use organs-on-chips for reasons including drug screening, drug toxicity, pharmacokinetics (which deals with drug absorption) and patient enrichment (which helps in recruiting highly sensitive patients to drug trials). Expenditure on OOC remains a tiny fragment of the huge expenditure on drug development worldwide, leaving scope for the market to expand rapidly without significantly impinging on pharma companies’ budgets.

While research organizations such as universities and government institutions are the second largest end user category, in terms of industrial end users, consumer goods and cosmetics are the next largest after pharma. A major factor here is restrictions on and objections to animal testing of cosmetics. Cosmetic tests on animals are now illegal in the EU, India, Israel, Norway, Turkey, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland. In the U.S. animal testing is not mandatory for obtaining regulatory approval, although the practice is still legal.

The global organ-on-chip market, valued at $59.4 million in 2018, will grow to $305 million by 2021 at an annual growth rate of around 70%.

This rapid growth in such a new market will result from increases in the number of collaborative sales agreements between the pharmaceutical companies and university spin-offs and the entry of new advanced models of OOCs into the market. Further improvements in the design and manufacture of OOCs will probably lead to them replacing animal models as subjects in many preclinical drug evaluations in the future. Advances in OOC technology have led drug regulatory bodies to start testing OOCs for their reliability and their use as an alternative to animal testing. For instance, in April 2017, the US Federal Drug Administration announced an agreement with Emulate Inc., a US-based biotechnology company, to evaluate the company’s human organ-on-chip technology in laboratories.

North America was the largest market for organs-on-chips in 2018, and the USA accounts for the dominant share of the North American market. This is mainly due to the presence of significant end-user companies, including major pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, as well as major research organizations. The provision of high-scale funding by several US government organizations including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also support the OOC market in the USA. Europe, another region where a high proportion of all drug development is currently undertaken, is the second-largest region for OOC sales, but Asia and the rest of the world will also see significant growth in the market up to 2021.

Interested To Know More About The Business Research Company?

The Business Research Company has published over 300 industry reports, covering over 2400 market segments and 56 geographies. The reports draw on 150,000 datasets, extensive secondary research, and exclusive insights from interviews with industry leaders.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *