Global market for oligos exceeds $700 million

ARLINGTON, Va.—According to the findings of a new report from BioInformatics LLC, total spending by research scientists on synthetic DNA oligonucleotides (oligos) is over US$700 million annually.

In the last decade, the demand for high quality oligonucleotides has risen with the focus on microarray technologies and antisense clinical research. Oligos represent a lucrative market for life science suppliers because these tools are critical to a wide variety of research applications and they are constantly being consumed with each experiment performed.

Because the overall market for oligos is considered mature, suppliers are challenged to distinguish their brand from the many others available to scientists.

BioInformatics—a market research and consulting firm—recently surveyed over 700 scientists who use synthetic oligos in their research. The results of this survey are presented in a new report, The Global Market for Synthetic Oligonucleotides.

This report follows a 2004 report, The U.S. Market for Synthetic Oligonucleotides, allowing the new report to offer some trend comparisons over the past two years.

For DNA oligos, respondents identified Integrated DNA Technologies as the dominant supplier. The other top suppliers of DNA oligos are Invitrogen, MWG Biotech, Operon Biotechnologies, and Sigma-Genosys (a division of Sigma-Aldrich).

"The exact order of the ranking beyond the top spot varies depending on which metric you use to look at the market," explains Dr. Tamara Zemlo, director, Syndicated Research and Analysis for BioInformatics. Some suppliers have a greater share of the market in terms of sales than they do in terms of volume sold, and vice versa. Those suppliers with a relatively greater market share based on sales are able to charge a premium for their oligo services. "Suppliers whose sales shares are much lower than their volume shares should consider ways to take advantage of their market share position to raise their prices."