Surgical Sealants, Glues Penetrating $15B Global Market

Oct. 28, 2012 - PRLog -- The worldwide market for products in wound sealing, closure, hemostasis and anti-adhesion represents a $15 billion current opportunity. Traditional wound closure products -- sutures and, more recently, staples and other mechanical wound closure -- still hold a lion's share of the market. However, the performance of advanced wound sealing and closure products in achieving effective management of wounds, as well as manufacturers' efforts to persuade clinicians to adopt these products, is steadily eroding the share of of the total wound closure market owned by sutures and staples.

"Innovative companies in this field have successfully promoted the clinical and economic benefits of wound sealing and closure accomplished by fibrin and other sealants, even to displace use of conventional sutures," notes Patrick Driscoll, President of MedMarket Diligence. "There remains big upside for these products, however, as sutures and staples continue to drive big annual revenues stemming from their pragmatic utility in strength of the wound closure, facility of their use in routine surgical practice, cost and other considerations."

This market is comprised of sutures and staples, mechanical (wound) closure devices, medical tape, hemostats, fibrin and other sealants, high-strength medical adhesives (specifically in wound closure) and post-surgical adhesion prevention products. These products are used in hospitals, medical clinics and physicians’ offices. (This "clinical" market does not address consumer, dental or veterinary markets, nor does it include medical adhesives used in manufacturing devices intended to be used for medical applications.)

The largest share of the global market is represented by sutures and staples, which have long been routine products handled by surgeons in managing acute and chronic wounds. Like most medtech markets, sutures and staples represent a relatively flat market, since little innovation other than the modest advances of absorbable sutures are enhancing their use in clinical practice.  Concurrently, biologically based sealants and glues like fibrin-based and other bioglues are demonstrating sufficient utility, ease of use and cost characteristics that they are progressively taking larger share of surgeons' overall caseload.  Greater strength in wound closure (with the high standard of sutures representing the challenge) remains a focus of ongoing development.  While cyanoacrylates and other similar "high-strength" glues have consistently demonstrated their ability to close structurally demanding wounds, their toxic byproducts have limited much of their use to topical applications in which such toxicity has lesser impact.

An additional advanced product type that has gained market foothold due to their clinical benefits hemostats. These products have demonstrated their potential, especially in highly demanding areas of acute trauma as in the traumatic wounds faced by providers in emergency medicine and battlefield injuries, to rapidly stop bleeding and dramatically increase survival prospects for patients.

Lastly, products for the prevention of anti-adhesion are also represented in this market since, although they seem to represent the "antithesis" of wound closure, the nature of their use in wound management leading to a reduction in post-surgical adhesions and the fact that frequently products like fibrin sealants demonstrate clinical value in anti-adhesion, make these products a part of this overall market.

The MedMarket Diligence report #S190, "Worldwide Market for Surgical Sealants, Glues, Wound Closure and Anti-Adhesion, 2012-2017" details current clinical and technology developments, with data on products in development (detailing market status) and on the market; market size and forecast; competitor market shares; competitor profiles; and market opportunity. The report provides full year historical actual data for 2010 and 2011 and forecast 2012-2017 of the markets for these technologies, with emphasis on the market impact of new technologies through the forecast period. The report provides specific forecasts and shares of the worldwide market by segment for Americas (detail for U.S., Rest of North America and Latin America), Europe (detail for United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Rest of Europe), Asia/Pacific (detail for Japan, Korea, Rest of Asia/Pacific) and Rest of World.

The report provides background data on the surgical, disease and traumatic wound patient populations targeted by current technologies and those under development, and the current clinical practices in the management of these patients, including the dynamics among the various clinical specialties or subspecialties vying for patient population and facilitating or limiting the growth of technologies. The report establish the current worldwide market size for major technology segments as a baseline for and projecting growth in the market through 2017. The report assesses and projects the composition of the market as technologies gain or lose relative market performance over this period. The report profiles 122 active companies in this industry, providing data on their current products, current market position and products under development.

For details on the report, including table of contents and list of exhibits, see http://www.mediligence.com/rpt/rpt-s190.htm.

To order the report for immediate download, see http://www.mediligence.com/store/page43.html.