A very futuristic approach of Life Sciences is on the way. New in vitro diagnostics systems, new therapy strategies, genetic diseases treatment, targeted and intelligent drug delivery, artificial pancreas… are health improvement promised to the future generations, enabled by semiconductor and MEMS technologies. The Life Sciences industry is already facing very important challenges to take its way to this expected innovation breakthrough.

Such future of Life Sciences will be possible by bringing together many different technologies like microelectronics, mechanics, optics, physics, molecular biology… Indeed microelectronics that has led to the explosion of consumer electronics sales could now bring its added value to different to the Life Science applications. The key challenge for microelectronics is to make complexity invisible, to make technology accurate, reproducible and intuitive for a natural use. They are already used for drug delivery dedicated products.

This expected evolution in the Life Sciences field requires thus teams from different background to collaborate and to understand the challenges each other is facing in its own domain. It involves being able to understand the biological ins and out as well as challenges to work together in identifying an innovative solution to propose.

To take part in this innovation process, it is very important to understand the technology and industrial trends by having a good view on the current technologies used, their limits and advantages, the applications and the way Life Science is working.

The Life Sciences field is considered as a very attractive field to target for the next innovation to launch. Some companies already succeed as shows the Affymetrix success story. In a little more than 10 years, using its technology coming from the semiconductor field and with key agreements with Life Science companies (Roche, Novartis, Aventis, BMS, bioMérieux…), Affymetrix is now dominating the biochip market worldwide with more than 70% market shares.

Several semiconductor companies are involved in Life Sciences like STMicroelectronics, Philips, Agilent… and several others have stopped their activity like Motorola, Infineon… Entering the Life Sciences field could be complex since it is a very broad field including many different industries like drug discovery, in vitro diagnostic, medical devices, instrumentation…

The market is much segmented in term of applications, technologies and medical use. Each field has its own specificity in term of industry organization, added value chain, industrial players, R&D activities, drivers and market entry barriers, entry point in the supply chain, position in the value chain… For example, selling devices is not always the best way to maximise the added value compared to a module/function approach. One of the main challenges in entering the Life Sciences field is to define the value of the technology to propose in this business.

The world of Biology – Definitions 6
Cell, DNA, Proteins,… Who’s who? 7
Biology and Micro/Nano Technology comparative scale 14
Molecular Biology, a complex world 15
Levels for Molecular Biology analysis: The OMICS World 18
Main technologies and applications 20

Presentation of the gold standard techniques used today in Life Sciences 22
Cell culture 23
Sample preparation 24
PCR amplification 25
Electrophoresis 26
Western Blotting 27
Sandwich immunoassays or ELISA 28
High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) 29
Mass spectrometry (MS) 30
Impact of microtechnologies on gold standard techniques 31

What is the Life Sciences field? 32
Main industrial domains and related applications 33
Overview of the main markets in Life Sciences field 36
Focus on Pharmaceutical industry 37
Focus on In Vitro Diagnostic industry 46
Focus on Medical Device industry 51

Why semiconductor devices and MEMS could be useful for Life Sciences applications? 56
MST materials and their added value for Life Science applications 58
MST added-value in the Life Science markets 65
What are BioMEMS & Biochips? Yole Développement’s definitions 70
Detailed analysis of microtechnology-based devices for Life Science applications:
Drivers in Life Science markets MST may answer
Existing applications and future MST products in the Life Science markets
Players and products example
Life Sciences research 80
Pharmaceutical industry 105
Diagnostic 112
Medicine 125
BioMEMS market size potential 2005 - 2010 138

Value chain analysis for biochips 142

Examples of companies’ success stories 148

Conclusion 155
Synthesis and challenges for the future
Key ingredients to succeed in this field

Presentation of Yole Développement 167