Life science industry chain and pharmaceutical equipment: the highlight track of the next decade

The vigorous development of the life science field has brought vitality to the biological research reagent market. The increase in funding for life science research has provided a good support for the development of the biological reagent industry, which accounts for about 10-15% of the total capital investment in the life science field. Compared with the world, the development of biological scientific research reagents in China is relatively late, but it has maintained a rapid growth trend in recent years, with a CAGR of 17.1% from 2015 to 2019, which is much higher than the global 8.1% in the same period.

Technological progress drives the demand for biological reagents. Since the 1960s, there have been flow cytometry, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, Western blot, enzyme-linked immunodot method and other technologies. The maturity of these experimental technologies and methodologies has generated a large number of needs for supporting biological reagents. With the advent of the second generation of high-throughput sequencing technology in 2000, the corresponding high-throughput sequencing library reagents began to appear in large demand. In recent years, with the application of CRISPR technology, Cas9 nuclease kits have begun to be launched. In the future, with the continuous development of new technologies in the field of life sciences, the corresponding demand for biological reagents will continue to expand, and the market size of biological reagents will continue to expand.

According to Sullivan data, the application scenarios of molecular biological reagents are rich, and the market size is expected to exceed 10 billion in 2024. Molecular biological reagents mainly refer to the types of reagents needed in the experiments of nucleic acids and small molecules, among which various molecular biological enzymes are mainly, such as PCR/qPCR series, reverse transcriptase, endonuclease, modification enzymes, cloning point mutations, etc. Molecular biological reagents are widely used in scientific research, high-throughput sequencing, in vitro diagnosis, biomedicine, animal quarantine and other fields, and their application ductility is strong. At the same time, the market size of various segments is growing rapidly, driving the demand for molecular biological reagents to grow rapidly.

In 2019, the market size of molecular biological reagents is about 6.9 billion yuan, and the scale of molecular biological scientific research reagents is expected to grow at a CAGR=12.3% from 2019 to 2024, reaching 12.4 billion yuan in 2024. At present, the competition pattern of domestic molecular reagents is relatively scattered, Novizan occupies the leading position in China, accounting for about 4%, and the remaining 55% market share is mostly divided by other domestic reagent production companies with smaller volumes, and the market concentration is not high on the whole, and the industry needs to be re-integrated. Secondly, imports account for a relatively high proportion. The total market share of the four foreign-funded enterprises, such as Thermo Field of the United States, Kagger of Germany, Roche Takara and BioRad of the United States, is 41%. However, due to changes in the international situation, exchange rate fluctuations and other factors, there are risks of rising prices and tight supply of imported products. The global spread of the new coronavirus epidemic in 2020 has further exacerbated the supply shortage of biological reagents, and the localization of the supply chain has attracted more and more attention from domestic scientific research institutions and enterprises, and China's biological reagent industry has received unprecedented development opportunities.

The protein biological reagent track is small and beautiful, and the growth momentum is sufficient. Recombinant proteins are proteins that use the DNA sequence of a specific gene as a template. According to the mechanism of action, it can be roughly divided into recombinant proteins and antibodies. Antibodies refer to immunoglobulins that can bind specifically to Kangtuan, accounting for a relatively high proportion, about 2/3, mainly for immune reactions.

Recombinant proteins are widely used in biological drug development, basic research and in vitro diagnostic reagents. Of the top 10 drugs by global sales in 2019, seven are biologic drugs, including monoclonal antibodies and fusion proteins. The market demand of monoclonal antibody drugs is huge, and recombinant protein is one of the important reagents for the study of monoclonal antibody drugs. In scientific research, recombinant proteins can be used in many aspects, such as structural analysis, cell culture, cell induction, differentiation, enzyme function study, substrate, reference, etc. 60%-80% of the cost of diagnostic reagents is the raw material of diagnostic reagents including diagnostic enzymes, antigens and antibodies, among which a part of diagnostic enzymes and antigens is recombinant proteins.

The scale of domestic recombinant protein market is growing rapidly. With the active research and development of biological drugs and the in-depth exploration of life science mechanisms, the global market for recombinant protein biological research reagents has grown from $500 million in 2015 to $800 million in 2019, and the market size is expected to reach $1.5 billion in 2024. The overall market of recombinant protein biological scientific research reagents in China grew from 400 million yuan in 2015 to 900 million yuan in 2019, and the market size is expected to reach 1.9 billion yuan in 2024, with a CAGR of nearly 20% in 9 years, and the industry scale is growing rapidly.