February 15, 2015 (Vol. 35, No. 4)
En Bloc Analysis Captures the Richness and Diversity of this Emerging Space
There are many facets of the broader extracellular vesicles (EV) marketplace. Our industry tracking focuses on the segments of this space shown in Figure 1.
We have analyzed all the publications in the broader EVs space in order to capture trends as well as connect specific themes with research groups and known opinion leaders performing these research activities.
Figure 1. Segmentation of the extracellular vesicles research marketplace.
When we analyzed the en bloc publications record of the broader EVs space, we found that there was a recurrence of specific molecular entities (biomarkers) that were published upon in EVs. Figure 2 shows this breakout (the ordinate of each of these graphs is the number of publications in each category segregated by year—represented by the color coding).
These results suggest specific sorting mechanisms trafficking molecular entities into EVs. In addition, in the context of biomarker potential of EVs, these results suggest potentially exquisite specificity in the development of biofluid biopsies vis-à-vis biomarkers to be interrogated.
Figure 2. En bloc publication analysis reveals a restricted set of markers found in exosomes.
Cancer is indeed the key driver of the broader EVs space and our analyses of various cancer classes have revealed the differential penetrance of EV research into distinct cancer classes as illustrated in Figure 3.
This market snapshot provides a sense of the EV landscape viewed from the prism of the ensemble of publications in this field—a fair means to assess this broad and diverse space. Top-down market analyses cannot capture the richness and diversity of an emerging space like exosomes and microvesicles. We have found analyzing en bloc is a powerful approach, which we complement with more traditional market analyses such as quantitative market models to generate the size of the field.
Figure 3. Penetrance of various cancer classes into the exosome research marketplace. The ordinate shows the number of publications in each cancer class in a given year and the abscissa represents the various cancer classes in this figure.
Enal Razvi, Ph.D. ([email protected]), is managing director of Select Biosciences, and Gary Oosta, Ph.D., is biotech analyst.
