Microarray Business - The Future Market

New Drugs: Agilent provides solutions and technologies for the microarray market. Why does Agilent invest into this market?

Kronick: Half of Agilent’s 1+ billion US dollar revenues of its Life Science & Chemical Analysis business comes from life science applications. Our expertise in complex measurement systems, combined with our HP inkjet heritage, provide an opportunity for Agilent to expand its life science business, while making unique and fundamental contributions to important areas of biology.

New Drugs: At BioArrays Europe you presented the “inkjet technology”. What are the distinctive features of this development?

Kronick: The most distinctive features are the flexibility in content and flexibility in format which inkjet technology enables. Since our printers create arrays with no masks or no pre-synthisized oligos, adding or changing content or layout can be easily accomplished.

New Drugs: What trends or highlights do you see in the microarray business?

Kronick: Two strong trends we see are 1) the need to bring down the cost of array experiments and 2) the desire (not unrelated to cost) of analyzing expression of fewer numbers of genes on large numbers of samples. In pursuing these goals, customers would prefer to be using customized content.

New Drugs:Protein Biochips will become increasingly important for diagnostic purposes etc. in the future. Which new products can Agilent offer in this field?

Kronick: Agilent recognizes that our strength in array creation, detection and analysis can be applied to protein microarrays. We thus are following developments closely. We cannot comment at this time on any plans to enter this market.

New Drugs: Where do you think that Agilent will position its products for the biotech market on a medium term and where do you see market opportunities for Agilent?

Kronick: Agilent will focus on those array products where flexible printing and associated open system architecture and components add value. Our rapidly growing number of catalog array offerings (with empirically validated content) speak to that emphasis. Our whole genome arrays will offer more content at lower cost with easier workflow. Our custom business will be enhanced by new tools and formats.