Following the news that the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the new coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern;

Tina Deng, Senior Medical Devices Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers her view:

“Through the use of metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), the sequence of the novel coronavirus has been quickly identified in China after the outbreak. The sequence has been shared with other countries, leading to the efficient development of diagnostic kits for real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), and potential treatment against the virus.

“GlobalData forecasts that mNGS will be one of the fastest-growing aspects that drive the infectious disease segment of the in-vitro diagnostics space. The infectious disease market was currently estimated at USD$7.6 bn, is expected to grow stably between 2019 and 2025, to USD$8.4 bn, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 2.2%. mNGS will be more popular in clinical microbiology laboratories for clinical diagnosis.

“mNGS uses high-throughput sequencing methods to simultaneously and independently sequence nucleic acid fragments. It can quickly and precisely identify novel and hard-to-detect pathogens directly from clinical samples, and plays a critical role in the diagnosis of infectious diseases that may cause a serious public health threat.”