This article easily wins my Best Title of the Month Award -- even if we are only at day six for February.
However, the contents are more serious. The Red Herring magazine contends that "there's a wide variety of biosensors coming down the commercial pipeline."
Here are some short excepts from this story.
Medical patients probably won't have to wait until 2020 for new biomedical technology to make its way into their doctor's arsenal. A new class of biosensors -- devices that can monitor health conditions and then respond by delivering drugs -- no bigger than a jelly bean should be available in five to seven years. Thanks to advances in nanotechnology, microelectromechanical systems, molecular diagnostics, and several other technologies, biosensors are now being developed to detect everything from the first chemical signature of cancer to the presence of anthrax.
The growing variety of biosensors can be grouped into two categories: implantable and external. Because external sensors employ widely used contact mechanisms like needles and lasers, this branch has advanced faster than implantables. The market for external biosensors, developed mostly for the blood sugar analysis required for treatment of diabetes, is projected to be $2 billion by 2004. The World Health Organization estimates that diabetes afflicts close to 20 million people in the United States alone, and 175 million people worldwide.
The most common medical devices for managing insulin-dependent diabetes are still a needle and blood sugar test strip. Archaic but lucrative, a standard needle and test strip kit costs about $10. Sales of the kits are approaching $4 billion worldwide and are expected to double by 2007.
Some analysts predict the market for implantable biosensors capable of detection and treatment will be worth three times that amount. But making these next-generation implantable biosensors will require several years of research and development. "For 30 years we've been trying just to develop an implantable sensor and glucose pump unit," says Francis Moussy, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of South Florida at Tampa, who will soon head a new bio-engineering center there. "The best we can do so far is an implantable sensor that lasts three days then must be removed."
Please read the full story to learn more about biosensors.
Source: Stephan Herrera, for Red Herring, February 5, 2003
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