Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market Assessment Trends (2021-2027)

The next-generation sequencing (NGS) market, having experienced significant stagnation from 2022 to 2024, is poised for a resurgence, with anticipated growth of 7% in 2025 and further acceleration to 9% in 2026 and 11% in 2027. This renewed momentum will be driven by broad clinical adoption, particularly in oncology, which remains the largest therapeutic area and is projected to contribute over $800M in absolute revenue growth by 2027.

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Clinical applications, including therapy selection, patient monitoring, and early cancer detection, are at the forefront of this market expansion. Additionally, rare disease diagnostics, women's health applications, and infectious disease testing are gaining traction, leveraging advancements in sequencing throughput and decreasing costs per sample.

Illumina is expected to retain a dominant position, supported by the NovaSeq X series, but faces intensifying competition from innovative players such as Oxford Nanopore, PacBio, and MGI. These competitors are driving market diversification with their differentiated technologies, such as native long-read sequencing and cost-efficient platforms.

While clinical testing is driving growth –driven by increasingly favorable reimbursement policies for complex genomic tests– challenges persist, including bioinformatics complexities, regulatory uncertainty, and pricing pressures, particularly in research and academic settings.

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This report assesses the NGS manufacturer market (i.e., excluding NGS service revenues [e.g., GH, NTRA]) across six segments:

• Company*: Illumina, Thermo Fisher (Ion Torrent), Oxford Nanopore, Pacific Biosciences, Roche, and others*
• Product Type: Instruments (including software) and Reagents (including consumables)
• Customer: Academic Basic Research, Population Studies, Biopharma R&D, Biopharma Clinical Trials, Liquid Biopsy Clinical Trials, Clinical Diagnostics (Oncology), Clinical Diagnostics (NIPT), Clinical Diagnostics (All other), Liquid Biopsy (Dx), Applied Markets, Industry, Epidemiology (including and primarily SARS-CoV-2)
• Application: human WGS, WES, Targeted Resequencing, RNA-Seq, and Others
• Therapeutic Area: Genomics, Oncology, Infectious Diseases, Method Development, and Others
• Geography: U.S., Europe, China, Asia/Pacific (APAC), and Rest of the world (RoW)

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We made many key changes in the 10th edition*:

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Updated Content

• Incorporated the latest trends in the NGS manufacturer market
• Updated market number in light of:
  • Significantly expected decrease in reagent revenues (in 2024 and beyond) due primarily to pricing pressure
  • Illumina's updated 2024 / 2025 revenue guidance
  • Larger contribution of NIPT than previously estimated
  • Adjusted combined growth for native long reads market growth from ~30% combined to ~25%
  • Significant guidance miss from PacBio and MGI, now estimated to have double-digit 2024 revenue declines

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Updated Market Trends

• Reassessed market trends for each of the market segments analyzed, including:
  • Customer types
  • Product and platform types
  • Applications and therapeutic areas
  • Geographies
• Reevaluated the potential of high-growth applications
  • Research applications (e.g., clinical oncology, single cell genomics, spatial transcriptomics)
  • Liquid biopsies (from early detection to monitoring**)

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Key Changes to Market Numbers

• Updated market numbers based on secondary research and latest trends up to Q3 2024
• Refined growth by application including:
  • More in-depth analysis of early cancer detection (EDx) and cancer monitoring manufacturer revenues, given significant ramp expected by 2027 (esp. for EDx)
  • Comprehensive look at long read attractiveness across use cases (including limitation with FFPE and blood samples)

• Validated and refined our projections of growth rates for key players, such as:
  • Illumina: Market share adjustments, given updated guidance and new product launch (e.g., TSO 500 v2)
  • Thermo Fisher: Instrument share loss, given expected competition in clinical decentralized settings from competitors with similarly streamlined workflows
  • Oxford Nanopore (ONT) & PacBio: Refined forecast given headwinds in basic research funding and interest for select clinical applications
  • Other: Major announcements from other players, most notably platform launch from new entrants; key refinements of forecasts to Element (300+ installed base in 2024) and Ultima (30+ instruments in 2024)

• Conducted a new forecast to 2027, considering recent and future known instrument launches