Abbott Evolves to Focus on Diagnostics

January was a month of change for healthcare giant Abbott said a senior medical devices analyst from GlobalData who asserted that the company’s latest cardiac diagnostics product represents a pathway to growth over the next few years.

The company’s proposed plans to separate into two companies announced in 2011 came into effect on January 1, with the medical business group keeping the Abbott name, while the research- based pharmaceutical company is now named AbbVie; this and will feature billion dollar blockbuster drug Humira among its products.

With the dust only just beginning to settle from this split, Abbott exemplified its strong presence in the cardiac biomarker in vitro diagnostics space only a week later, by gaining CE Marking for its Architect Stat High Sensitive Troponin-I Assay on January 9. This will challenge products from other major players such as Roche and Siemens in the diagnostic troponin market in Europe.

Savade Solanki, Ph.D GlobalData's Senior Analyst covering Medical Devices, describes the new product’s strengths: “Abbott has reported that this high-sensitivity troponin-I assay can provide reliable data to emergency physicians two to four hours after patient admission. This is a great improvement over early generation troponin assays, where multiple testing was often required, and patients sometimes had to wait over 12 hours to allow reliable detection of troponin levels. This test will enable caregivers to make critical patient management decisions earlier, and this should result in both health and economic benefits.”