Diagnostics In 2015: Past Trends Coalesce, New Roads Open

Many of the fundamental trends and issues we’ve spotted in the past several years – the degree of leverage the diagnostics industry can gain from the integration of companion diagnostics into pharma’s development planning, the regulation of laboratory-developed tests, and the infiltration of next-generation genome sequencing on just about every level of drug/diagnostics development, for example – coalecsed in 2015, much as they had started to do last year when we titled our year-in-review piece “More of the Same.” (See Also see "Diagnostics In 2014: More Of The Same" - In Vivo, 21 January, 2015..) This past year may be thought of as one of acceptance, or consolidation of thought. These matters are now well-trod turf. But much new territory was also claimed during the year, most notably in the areas of digital health, data acquisition and analytics.

Call it the ascendance of the app, and no story carries more weight than the introduction of Apple’s ResearchKit, announced in March and made available to developers a month later. The ResearchKit is an open-source software framework that allows researchers and developers to create apps to gather patient data for studies more frequently and accurately