6. Biochips market

Biochips were developed and marketed in the 1990s. Since then, the market has undergone tremendous growth. Valued at $760 million in 2010, it is expected to reach $1,425.2 million by 2015. The Morgan Stanley report of May 2010 shows that the microarray market is essentially held by three companies. Affymetrix, the main industry leader in microarrays and associated reagents, accounts for 38% of market share, Illumina for 34% and Agilent for 17% (figure 16 and table 3 ). Competition is fierce, and Roche/NimbleGen, which holds just 5.5% of the market, has decided to cease its microarray business by the end of 2012, in order to focus on sequence capture and next-generation sequencing. The "gene expression" application...