Surabhi Garg, industry manager for drug discovery technology at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based market research firm of Frost & Sullivan, estimates the microfluidics market at $3.4 billion by 2004. "We are talking about an emerging industry. It will have an explosive growth," she says. According to Garg, what's driving this market is the promise of replacing an array of laboratory apparatuses with a microchip that can be put into a personal computer.
Garg is not alone in her optimism. "The value proposition is that you're going to be able to do what is done today more efficiently and more cheaply. In a lot of life science experimentation, ... one of the highest-cost items is the reagent," says John Kim, a managing director of Burrill & Co., a San Francisco-based investment firm. These reagents can be difficult-to-make molecular compounds used in various analyses. Using far smaller amounts to test efficacy can ...
