The technology has already been developed and proven in an academic setting. It's mature enough that you can find cheap textbooks for it. Microfluidic assays (which can be combined, like circuits, on a silicon chip) for every conceivable metric of interest have been developed, debugged, and sold to incumbent diagnostics companies. It was only a matter of time before someone integrated them, but the "usual suspects" were tripped up by market kinetics:
No academic group has been sufficiently capitalized to pursue an "Integrate All The Assays" (IATA) project. A lab typically pursues 2 or 3 assays at a time, which they will often integrate into a "µTAS" which is academic slang for IATA but should get its own term because typical µTASs measure 2 or 3 things which is far below the potential of the technology (what I'm terming "IATA").
Industrial groups that were in a position to go IATA already had hard-won silos in the payola+bundling ridden rat's nest of the medical supply industry. They wanted to keep those (payola+bundling = low competition and high margins) and they didn't want to fight the war-on-many-fronts that would arise if they tried to invade everyone else's silos at once. The big risk is that their competitors in every silo could undercut/outmaneuver them in individual silos faster than they could weave a political network to unify purchasing across silos.
Well, now someone has figured out how to do just that. Strategy: lots of money, lots of connections, and a killer entry strategy. It's all in the execution, as always.
Two interesting questions to keep in mind as this plays out:
1. Now that someone has gone IATA, will the medical device supply industry become truly competitive again? I think there's a nonzero chance of that happening. That would be a dream come true for consumers and medtech startups alike.
2. How much of the proceeds will filter back to the people who actually developed the technology? Obviously the answer will be "a teeny tiny fraction," but the amount in absolute terms will be an important indicator (to me, personally, and I suspect others) as to how well the patent system works in this sector. Will it be like the software sector (patents discourage implementation AND don't encourage innovation) or will it be like the drug sector (patents function more or less as they were intended albeit with the caveat that a lion's share of the proceeds flows, as it always does, to capital)?
FTA, it seems she's front-running some approvals requirements and the sales / payola cycle by running a testing lab as well as developing the tests.
To IT people, this is counterintuitive. You don't vertically integrate, you go for a horizontal slice. Intel won by making chips, not making whole systems (like IBM did).
I guess vertical integration might make more sense in healthcare though, for regulatory and market reasons. I guess the market might be a bit more like IBM renting out mainframes than Intel selling CPU to OEMs. Also, making the tests cheaper (which is the main thing she's doing) might be unattractive to labs, if cost-plus pricing is popular - existing providers might not want to cut their prices.
http://www.rsc.org/ej/LC/2009/b911553f/b911553f-f1.gif
Here's an early paper to use as a root for citation-chasing:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/09254005908...
Here's a conference that has been going strong for 7 years:
http://www.microtas2013.org/general.html
The technology has already been developed and proven in an academic setting. It's mature enough that you can find cheap textbooks for it. Microfluidic assays (which can be combined, like circuits, on a silicon chip) for every conceivable metric of interest have been developed, debugged, and sold to incumbent diagnostics companies. It was only a matter of time before someone integrated them, but the "usual suspects" were tripped up by market kinetics:
No academic group has been sufficiently capitalized to pursue an "Integrate All The Assays" (IATA) project. A lab typically pursues 2 or 3 assays at a time, which they will often integrate into a "µTAS" which is academic slang for IATA but should get its own term because typical µTASs measure 2 or 3 things which is far below the potential of the technology (what I'm terming "IATA").
Industrial groups that were in a position to go IATA already had hard-won silos in the payola+bundling ridden rat's nest of the medical supply industry. They wanted to keep those (payola+bundling = low competition and high margins) and they didn't want to fight the war-on-many-fronts that would arise if they tried to invade everyone else's silos at once. The big risk is that their competitors in every silo could undercut/outmaneuver them in individual silos faster than they could weave a political network to unify purchasing across silos.
Well, now someone has figured out how to do just that. Strategy: lots of money, lots of connections, and a killer entry strategy. It's all in the execution, as always.
Two interesting questions to keep in mind as this plays out:
1. Now that someone has gone IATA, will the medical device supply industry become truly competitive again? I think there's a nonzero chance of that happening. That would be a dream come true for consumers and medtech startups alike.
2. How much of the proceeds will filter back to the people who actually developed the technology? Obviously the answer will be "a teeny tiny fraction," but the amount in absolute terms will be an important indicator (to me, personally, and I suspect others) as to how well the patent system works in this sector. Will it be like the software sector (patents discourage implementation AND don't encourage innovation) or will it be like the drug sector (patents function more or less as they were intended albeit with the caveat that a lion's share of the proceeds flows, as it always does, to capital)?