A revolutionary gene-editing technology is on track to be a $10 billion market by 2025
Samantha Lee/Business Insider
- CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing technology, has only been around for a few years, but its use has already exploded among the life sciences.
- According to a new report by Citi GPS, the market for CRISPR will go to $10 billion by 2025.
- It's a big leap considering that the technology hasn't been tested in human trials yet in the US and the market's currently less than $1 billion.
A revolutionary gene-editing tool will grow into a $10 billion market in 2025, according to a new report by Citi GPS.
CRISPR, short for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats," is a revolutionary tool that allows researchers to go into a cell's DNA and modify a mutated part of the gene, a process known as gene editing. It's currently being used in research settings, and it has the potential to be used to treat diseases, enhance agriculture and livestock, and even modify human embryos.
"The shift to CRISPR genome editing and the rapid expansion of its use is expected to have a disruptive and far-reaching impact on multiple branches of science and medicine," Citi biotech analyst Yigal Nochomovitz wrote in the report.
Getting to a $10 billion market
The technology is still relatively new. CRISPR as it's being used today has only been around since 2012, and trials to see how the technology works in humans have yet to kick off here in the US, though human trials have begun in China. According to Citi's report, human trials in the US are expected to kick off in late 2017 or early 2018.
But there have been some promising developments, which led Nochomovitz to think that the technology would have a huge market potential in the next eight years, up from the less than $1 billion market size it has in 2017.
Nochomovitz said:
"Currently the CRISPR market is small, with its main offerings dedicated to lab work and scientific research via research toolkits. However, the real economic potential of CRISPR lies with human therapeutics. With CRISPR-based therapeutics having already entered human trials last year in China, the first CRISPR-based medicine could reach the market in ~6 years or less."
"If CRISPR gene editing works in early test cases of human disease, the long-term upside for the technology could be much, much greater," Nochomovitz added.
By Citi's count, there has also been more than $300 million in venture funding for gene-editing startups, and the publicly traded companies in this space have a combined $3 billion+ market cap.
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