Biosensor
A biosensor is an analytical device for the detection of an analyte that combines a biological component with a physicochemical detector component. It has a sensitive biological element, transducer or the detector element and a reader device with the associated electronics. Few applications are in glucose monitoring in diabetes patients, environmental applications for the detection of pesticides and river water contaminants such as heavy metal ions, remote sensing of airborne bacteria such as in counter-bioterrorist activities, detection of pathogens, determining levels of toxic substances before and after bioremediation, detection and determining of organophosphate, routine analytical measurement of folic acid, biotin, vitamin B12 and pantothenic acid as an alternative to microbiological assay, determination of drug residues in food, such as antibiotics and growth promoters, particularly meat and honey, drug discovery and evaluation of biological activity of new compounds, protein engineering in biosensors and detection of toxic metabolites such as mycotoxins.
Market
Biosensors market is being driven by the increase in R&D activities for developing biosensors, which provide highly accurate real-time diagnosis, and the demand for these biosensor based equipment. Intensive R&D activities emergence of new technologies, such as microfluidics, and non-invasive biosensing alternatives constitute major market drivers. The global demand for Biosensors in Medical Devices is forecast to reach US$16.5 billion by the year 2017. US ranks the single largest market for Biosensors, followed by Europe.
Medical segment
Medical segment is the main research area for biosensors accounting for a great portion of the global biosensors market.particularly in medical field biosensors find applications in blood glucose monitoring, drug discovery, drug analysis, whole blood analyzers for examining of blood gases, health related signs such as monitoring of cholesterol, glucose, and coagulation levels, electrolyte analyzers metabolite analyzers, vitamin analysis and water and wastewater analysis. Glucose Biosensors represent the largest segment of the global biosensors market.