Big Diagnostics Companies See the Genomics Light

Until now, large diagnostics companies have played a game of tortoise and hare when it comes to getting involved in perhaps the industry's biggest paradigm shift in a decade: molecular markers that will help make advanced diagnostics part of the treatment process. They've mostly just watched as a handful of upstarts, some large and some small, get genomic diagnostics products on the market. To be sure, hardly any of the products have FDA approval and in many cases their clinical utility isn't well known. But these tests are getting validated, in some cases they're patent-protected, and they're bringing in revenues.

These young companies were more visible at the meeting of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) this year than...