Medical imaging plays a prominent role
in clinical trials as it can help in providing answers to the critical
challenges that occur in drug development process. It takes about 15
years for a drug to move from a laboratory set-up to FDA approval. The
chances of a compound getting regulatory approval are minimal as out of 6
to 11,000 compounds that are evaluated in the pre-clinical stage, only 5
are able to make it to the clinical trials and only one of them gets
regulatory approval. Medical imaging can help play a crucial role in the
product development process as it can reduce the late-stage attrition
by gathering more information in the pre-clinical trials of safety,
efficacy, and mechanism of action.
Medical imaging applications for
pharmaceutical clinical trials include identifying disease
predisposition, diagnosing and evaluating lesions and their severity,
determining the responder patients, and monitoring therapy effects and
their follow-ups. Nuclear imaging techniques such as positron emission
tomography (PET) are used to observe drug pharmacokinetics and
distribution along with studying the specific molecular endpoints. For
drug efficacy studies, use of imaging surrogate endpoints and imaging
biomarkers can provide quick results with good statistical power as they
help in facilitating small group sizes. In addition, imaging has a huge
potential in drug safety assessment during clinical trials in the
absence of suitable biomarker. With its widespread applications, medical
imaging is witnessing a rapid growth in its use for clinical trials. In
fact, medical imaging is used as an endpoint for about half of all
clinical trials.
Factors that are driving the growth of
the global clinical trial imaging market are increase in the
biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, rise in the number of
contract manufacturing/contract research organizations, and an overall
increase in research and development spending. Furthermore, the
increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, portability and
miniaturization of equipment, and rise in geriatric population are
fueling the growth of the market. On the other hand, high cost of
installation of these systems and enormous cost of clinical trials are
projected to impede the growth of the market. However, the rise in
demand for multimodal imaging systems and the growth potential offered
by the emerging markets are projected to further boost the growth of the
market during the forecast period.
The global clinical trial imaging market
is segmented into product, end-user, modality, and geography. In terms
of product, the market is classified into software and services. The
services segment is expected to have a significant share of the market
owing to high costs associated with the imaging equipment. The
biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies have been forced to outsource
imaging clinical trials to service providers owing to the high cost. In
terms of modality, the market is divided into PET, MRI, ultrasound, CT,
X-Ray, and ECHO. The CT segment is projected to dominate the market.
Based on end-user, the market is segmented into biotechnology companies,
pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, medical
device manufacturers, government research and academic institutes,
skincare companies, and others. Pharmaceutical companies are projected
to account for a prime share of the market.
In terms of geography, the global
clinical trial imaging market is distributed over North America, Europe,
Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. North
America is expected to dominate the market in terms of size owing to
presence of large number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies,
large R&D spending, and rise in number of contract research
organizations (CROs). North America is followed by Europe. The market in
Asia Pacific is expected to register a fast growth due to rapid
advancements in the health care infrastructure and rise in prevalence of
chronic diseases.
The major prominent players operating in
the clinical trial imaging market are Cardiovascular Imaging
Technologies LLC, Intrinsic Imaging, LLC, PAREXEL International
Corporation, BioClinica, Inc, ICON plc, Biomedical Systems, IXICO PLC,
WorldCare Clinical, LLC, and VirtualScopics Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment