The automation revolution upstream of the life sciences

First, the emergence of new scenes and old technologies

Through the statistics of the financing data in the past two years, we can intuitively understand that laboratory automation has become a "visible" outlet, behind the rise of demand in addition to investors in the field of innovative drugs and devices "stumble" after a rush to seek a way out of exploration. 36kr summed it up in the following six points:

① The epidemic is a very direct "catalyst". Not only routine clinical diagnosis requires more rapid and accurate test results, but also pays more attention to personnel safety. The high infectivity and pathogenicity of viruses have put forward the most direct demand for the automation of the whole process involving sample processing, inspection and testing, and sample storage. The automation demand in the field of life science has been verified again, and the rigid demand for the automation of relevant staff has become irreversible.

② With the rapid development of downstream applications in life sciences, the laboratory field is also facing great challenges, such as drug research and development and screening, gene sequencing and other popular technologies for massive real-time data and advanced technical methods to increase the demand.

At present, the domestic substitution window period of the life science support industry represented by laboratory instruments. Due to the characteristics of the industry, the customer stickness of the life science support industry is high, and local pharmaceutical companies have long relied on imported products - but the delivery time is often several months, some products are even out of stock, and the price reduction pressure brought by medical insurance negotiations and collection. In order to ensure the safety and stability of the supply chain and low cost, the domestic substitution of upstream products is an inevitable trend.

(4) Because this subdivision track is quite interdisciplinary and has a high threshold for entry, it can form a monopoly on technology or patents, and it can generate relatively stable cash flow at an early stage. At present, the awareness of risk aversion in the whole venture capital circle is enhanced and the desire for "revenue generating" is extremely strong, laboratory automation has become everyone's "heart".

In view of the fact that automation has been relatively mature in industrial, 3C and other fields, we are eager to find landing opportunities in new vertical fields, because the degree of automation is low and the industry ceiling and high added value, the life science field has become a new track that is jointly locked.

⑥ From an incremental point of view, in order to improve the rapid response ability to major epidemics, China has ushered in a boom in the construction of biosafety P2 and P3 laboratories, or will drive tens of thousands of large-scale laboratories to invest in the construction, for laboratory automation and intelligent manufacturers, which is also a huge business opportunity.

Driving force: Calculate the "economic account"

From the perspective of the environment, "before the money is very good to earn, now the money is not good to earn", enterprises in particular need to reduce expenses, a key measure is to carry out intelligent transformation, but the premise is to calculate the "economic account" : That is, after the downstream customers complete the automation transformation, the flux brought by the unit space and manpower expenditure is much higher than that of the traditional way, and there is still significant investment income after deducting the purchase income.

Approximate costing for traditional VS automated methods (36 kr drawing)

At present, laboratory automation is a "stock change + incremental rise" business. On the one hand, the form of automation is constantly upgrading and needs to be updated, and it is mainly used in drug research and development, clinical testing, genomics solutions and other fields - the market share of the above is only about 10%; On the other hand, some new scenarios are being mined and applied to form an incremental market involving life science research, molecular diagnostics, synthetic biology, cell culture, etc.

Therefore, at present, for the potential scale of laboratory automation, the market has no authority and unified calculation caliber. Based on interviews with investors and entrepreneurs, as well as backtracking on market demand, 36kr summarizes three main measurement methods, all pointing to the 100 billion market:

First of all, there are nearly 13,000 laboratories in China (including universities and research institutes, hospitals and third-party medical testing centers, new drug R&D enterprises, CRO companies, etc.), with a total cost of RMB 10 million per unit, or RMB 120 billion. In addition, the domestic laboratory analytical instruments market size of 70 billion, if the full range of automation transformation and upgrading, will also bring 10 billion market.

Secondly, the potential market space of China's life science research market is nearly 650 billion yuan. Referring to other mature industries, automation technology is expected to bring 20% incremental output value to the market through quality efficiency improvement, that is, 130 billion yuan; If coupled with the full replacement of the nearly 50 billion yuan market size of traditional human research services, this will be an unmet market with nearly 200 billion yuan of potential demand driven by downstream industrial applications.