RFID Market to Exceed $14 billion in Life Sciences

Surprisingly, the market that holds the greatest monetary opportunity—the use of RFID in e-pedigrees—is an area where return on investment has been difficult to find. That's largely because of the costs associated with putting RFID tags on individual bottles of drugs, and the fact that doing so, while improving drug safety, isn't delivering any improvement in efficiencies or other hard business benefits. "There are few pilots underway at some of the major pharmaceutical companies," Newmark says. "But we've seen a slowdown of the development of new pilots. Most companies are still waiting to see a real, true return on investment."

Some of the other categories the study identified, such as biospecimen tracking, are already showing some monetary and business benefits from the use of RFID. Newmark pointed to a cancer research facility in France that has just finished a pilot that tested RFID tags on biospecimen samples. The Paoli Calmettes Institute's Cell Therapy Facility and Tumor Cell Bank stores more than 170,000 biospecimens, with 1,300 new samples arriving monthly.

Several years ago, the institute began using bar codes to label tubes and bags of specimens (replacing even more manually-intensive handwritten labels) that are cryogenically frozen and stored at very low temperatures. But the labels are often unreadable until the samples are unfrozen, and still have to be individually scanned, which is very time-consuming. Such problems lead to 5 to 10 percent of samples getting lost each year, and with samples worth $3,000 to $5,000 (a price that includes biology and medical annotation) the losses can add up.

The RFID tags tested in the pilot can withstand the temperature conditions and have proven to be much more efficient. Even at a cost of $1 to $2 dollars per tag, the company expects it could save $2.3 million to $3.9 million annually by eliminating just 5 percent of the samples lost, Newmark says.

The Paoli Calmettes Institute still uses printed labels for most items, but is starting to attach RFID tags to thousands of samples and may begin tagging liquid-containing bags, according to Newmark. The institute hopes to have all new incoming and outgoing samples tagged by the end of 2006, he says.