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Digitalization: the reinvention of spine companies’ supply chains and controlling the inventory-to-revenue ratio

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Neurosurgery

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Traditional spine companies’ supply chains are linear, labour intensive and siloed and their inventory-to-revenue ratios tend to be high
To remain relevant in an environment where the physical and digital worlds are converging company leaders will need to improve their supply chains
Digitalization can help achieve this but requires embracing data management techniques
As a response to the COVID-19 crisis some MedTech’s introduced and extended their digital strategies
Have they done enough to remain relevant in a rapidly evolving ecosystem?

- Low back pain and the global spine industry -

Digitalization: the reinvention of spine companies’ supply chains and controlling the inventory-to-revenue ratio

In 2020, spine companies, like most MedTechs, absorbed shocks of the COVID-19 crisis by digitizing aspects of their supply chains, which consists of a wide range of transactions and constitute a significant part of a company’s’ total value creation. Industry observers are asking: Will enterprises extend their digitalization strategies and emerge stronger after the impact of the pandemic, or will they reduce their digital activities and emerge weaker?

Market changes

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the days of business-as-usual for spine companies were numbered as technologies advanced, regulations became more stringent, populations aged, healthcare systems struggled with unsustainable costs of surgeries for common age-related degenerative disc disorders, and payors tightened their reimbursement policies. In the US, which is the biggest market for spinal implants and devices, an increasing percentage of people have become covered by Medicare and Medicaid [state and federal government healthcare programmes], which reimburse providers at a fraction of private healthcare insurance levels. These changes encouraged independent hospitals in the US to join purchasing syndicates, clinicians to give up private practice and become salaried employees of hospitals, and private payors to shift away from a fee-for-service provision towards a value-based reimbursement approach focussed on improving patient outcomes and lowering costs. This shift encouraged policies to keep patients out of hospitals and increased the utilization of outpatient settings and other measures expected to improve outcomes and generate shared savings.

The structural headwinds described here have not abated and are likely to intensify over the next five years. To prosper in this evolving ecosystem, companies will need to devise and enhance solutions that bring enhanced clinical benefits to patients and economic rewards to the system. Tried and tested and widely used digital strategies can help to improve supply chains. However, while these structural changes have been progressing, spine market supply chains have tended to remain linear and labour-intensive and are now becoming significant obstacles to change, while producing infrastructures with unsustainable costs.

In the Commentary

This Commentary suggests that, over the next five years, market forces will oblige spine companies to pivot away from their inefficient supply chains and start developing supply networks, predicated upon digital strategies that add value to patients and reduce costs. Such systems, employ common digital applications that are used extensively in other industries to ensure the right products and services are delivered to the right place, at the right time, at the lowest cost. This would constitute a “first step” in a bigger digital transformation of the spine market, which will be necessary to create new levels of productivity, growth, and sustainability. We suggest that the reluctance of some MedTech’s to transition from inefficient supply chains to efficient ones could be explained by a significant proportion of their C suite members not acquiring a familiarity with digital systems until much later in their careers when they were adults. The Commentary uses two concepts: ‘digitization’ and ‘digitalization’. The former is a process to convert various physical signals into digital formats and the latter leverages digitized information to improve business processes.

Digitizing supply chains

Over the past two decades the cost of digital technologies has plummeted while their power and capabilities have substantially increased. This has enabled business leaders to combine technologies associated with information and operations and empowered them to create value in new and different ways. Improved processing capabilities now augment human thinking to analyse more data more quickly, and then act upon the outcomes. Such changes have ushered in the new digital era for MedTech’s.

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However, the spine market has been slow, compared to other industries, to adopt digital supply networks. The process of developing such strategies to drive productivity, while absorbing the shock of a pandemic has not been easy as it meant installing new technologies under pressure. However, the COVID-19 crisis created an incentive to reconfigure operations. The companies that did this have an opportunity to develop an omnichannel [multichannel approach to sales and marketing] dedicated to enhancing engagements with healthcare professionals and improving the overall quality of care, patient outcomes, revenues, productivity, employee satisfaction, and talent attraction and retention. But this will mean companies establishing virtual options as a core competence and reinventing the way they engage with stakeholders to provide a seamless experience across digital, remote, and in-person channels.

Neo Medical and value-based spine care

A firm that has employed digital strategies to streamline part of its supply chain to enhance value and gain a competitive edge is Neo Medical, a privately held Swiss company founded in 2013 by two former Stryker employees. The company has developed a universal value-based surgical spine platform to provide patients with high quality outcomes at relatively low costs. Neo’s approach is predicated upon its ability to reduce an instrument set, comprised of >200 screw sizes to 14, and use it in a novel approach to thoracolumbar fusion. [The thoracolumbar spine is the area between your stiff thoracic cage and your mobile lumbar spine].

Neo refers to its solution as a ‘controlled fixation’, which is beginning to have an impact in markets across the EU-27, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and more recently, the US. The approach is designed to facilitate an anatomically neutral, balanced, and stable spine load bearing to achieve a more functional fusion. It is reported that the platform: (i) enables clinicians to limit stress overload on a patient’s spine and thereby reduces the risk of screws loosening and hardware failing, (ii) limits infections, (iii) removes the need for re-sterilization, (iv) declutters the operating room, (v) reduces revision rates and (vi) cuts costs.Equally important are Neo’s digital strategies to provide an easier and more efficient experience for patients, surgeons, and hospitals.

Findings of a study, published in the December 2020 edition of Interdisciplinary Neurosurgery, suggest that Neo Medical’s value proposition saves costs by: (i) reducing supply chain processing and logistical expenses, (ii) decreasing rates of contaminated instruments, (iii) minimizing operating room delays and (iv) potentially lowering revision and infection rates.

Reconfiguring the supply chain

By contrast, traditional industry supply chains tend to be linear, labour intensive and siloed. As suggested by Neo Medical and others, digitalization can transform these inefficient systems into dynamic, interconnected efficient networks with the capacity to accommodate a range of stakeholders simultaneously. The shift from linear, sequential structures to interconnected, open supply operations could provide a foundation for how spine companies compete in the future.

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Companies in other sectors have already made such transformations and integrated their supply networks into their operations and decision-making processes with the objective of gaining competitive advantages. However, business leaders should be mindful that the more customer focussed enterprises become, the more developed their data and analytical capabilities must be.

Currently, few MedTech’s integrate their supply chains into their long-term strategies, and few actively and fully embrace the potential of data management techniques. This reluctance decreases a company’s ability to optimize inventories and enhance operational efficiencies of product offerings moving across supply chains. Given the increasing number of exogenous forces affecting the spine market, [e.g., ageing populations, vast and escalating healthcare costs, more stringent reimbursement policies, pricing pressures, tightening regulations, increasing competition, advancing technologies and heightened customer expectations], it seems reasonable to suggest that investing in and developing digital supply networks could be a logical step to enhance value agendas.

Appropriate digitalization of supply chain planning and processing could help to: (i) reduce operational siloes, (ii) respond effectively to market disruptions, (iii) minimize the time, costs and risks associated with onboarding and collaborating with suppliers, (iv) deliver products and services that customers need, when they need them, where they need them at the lowest cost and (v) enable end-to-end supply chain visibility and transparency to facilitate gathering and analysing real-time intelligence to enhance efficiencies.

C suites and digital immigrants

Given that there are significant advantages in adopting digital technologies, why is the spine market lagging other industries in adopting such strategies to improve its supply chains to enhance its productivity and sustainability? A preponderance of digital immigrants among C suites could help to explain why some MedTech’s fail to grasp the full potential of digitalization strategies. Let us explain.

According to research undertaken by Korn Ferry, a consulting firm, the average age of a C suite executive of the top 1,000 US organizations is ~57. Statista confirms this and reports that in 2018, the average age of CEOs in US at the time they were hired stood at 54 years, while the average age of CFOs when they were hired was 50. Since 2005 the average age for CEOs and CFOs has been trending upwards. To the extent that these data are indicative of MedTech’s, it seems reasonable to suggest that their C suite members: (i) would have completed their formative schooling before the digital era, and (ii) when they started their professional careers the digital age was just beginning. For example, in 1989 only 15% of US households owned a personal computer, <1% of the world's technologically stored information was in a digital format, and the World Wide Web did not become publicly available until 1991. In 1990, when the average C suite member would have been ~31, there were only ~12.5m cell phone subscribers worldwide; ~0.25% of the world’s population, and Internet users only amounted to ~2.5m; 0.05% of the world’s population. In 2002, when the average US C suite executive would have: (i) been ~37, (ii) completed their professional training and (iii) well into their careers, digital technologies were still relatively underdeveloped. For example, cell phone subscribers were only ~1.5bn; 19% of the world’s population, and Internet users were only ~631m; 11% of the world’s population.

This suggests that during C suite executive’s formative education and professional training, digital technologies were embryonic, and the Internet, mobile devices, social networking, big data, and computing clouds, had not yet transformed work practices and healthcare. Thus, a significant proportion of current executives of US MedTech’s could be digital Immigrants: people whose professional careers were influenced by analogue technologies, paper, and television, and they only acquired a familiarity with digital systems later in their careers when they were adults. This could affect their ability to appreciate the full potential of digital technologies and help to explain the relative reluctance of MedTech’s to digitize labour intensive, inefficient, linear supply chains.

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Stringent regulation and digitization

This reluctance becomes more significant as regulators demand that MedTech’s employ more sophisticated digital strategies. Increasingly, people are being given spinal implants and devices, which cannot be subsequently removed. Patients rely on these to be safe and to perform as intended for their lifetime, and regulators are devising more stringent rules to ensure that this is the case. For example, the European Medical Device Regulation (MDR), which entered into force in May 2017, requires all medical devices sold in the EU-27 and Switzerland to be MDR approved. The EU-27 represents ~33% of the spine market’s global revenues. MDR governs the production and distribution of medical devices and their compliance. The regulation states that, “Medical device manufacturers are required to have systematic methods for examining their devices once available on the market, by systematically gathering, recording, and analysing data on safety and performance”. MDR expects all MedTech’s to have robust supply chains and the ability to conduct data-driven audits to trace manufacturing modifications to specific implants and devices and to prove the resolution of any problem that might arise. While tightening regulations increase approval costs and prolongs product development time, they also provide incentives for companies to enhance their digital supply networks.

Controlling the inventory-to-revenue ratio

A digital supply network can enhance an organization’s ability to manufacture products in optimum volumes and deliver them to the right customers at the right time. This could help to improve patient outcomes and lower costs. Also, digitalization assists enterprises to enhance the control of their inventory by improving planning, forecasting and management, which is critical given their relatively high inventory-to-revenue ratios.

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and

Low back pain, spine surgery and market shifts

Spine surgeons in hospitals need to have relevant implants and devices available in the operating room at the right time. Hospitals need to be able to locate products in their cabinets. Without appropriate digitalization strategies health professionals would need to spend time searching for devices that may or may not be used during an operation. This means increased costs, as high value surgical trays would flow through inefficient supply chains.

To reduce costs, hospitals and healthcare systems push the responsibility for inventory management onto their suppliers. This results in a range of different models, which tends to increase the risks to manufacturers. Currently, spine companies manage a range of different types of inventories, with a significant proportion of their product offerings being held either on consignment or by sales reps, who often spend time managing offerings on behalf of their customers. This increases the difficulty to accurately account for supply levels, location, ownership, and usage, which further complicates billing and replenishment and often leads to excess inventory and unnecessary costs.

A digital supply network can help to reduce these inefficiencies by eliminating waste and saving costs for all stakeholders. Typically, spine surgical sets contain several types of devices, plates, and screws, and usually are sold on consignment. Hospitals return these for re-provisioning often after only having used some of the items in the trays. To guarantee that sales-reps and hospitals have sufficient supplies, manufacturers maintain relatively large, consigned inventories, at significant costs, which impact on the rate of excess and obsolete inventories.

A digital supply network effectively connects manufactures with their sales-reps and hospitals to reduce inefficiencies. Surgical trays are tagged with radio-frequency identification (RFID), so they can be effortlessly tracked by hospitals’ smart cabinets and by all other stakeholders. This allows: (i) hospitals to be billed as soon as a surgical tray, or a part of it, is removed, and the replenishment process started, and (ii) suppliers to reduce their consigned inventory, reduce their excess and obsolete inventory, and reduce their costs.

Ethical issues

We have broached some of the functional benefits and challenges of digitizing supply chains. Before closing, let us briefly draw attention to some ethical issues associated with digitization, which include increasing the challenges associated with data privacy, cybercrime, and the need to keep pace with new and rapidly developing technologies. This gives weight to environmental, social and governance (ESG) agendas, which are positioned to play an increasingly prominent role over the next five years and shall be discussed in a future Commentary.

Takeaways

We have made some suggestions about how common digitalization strategies could improve spine market supply chains and create added value for patients while delivering the highest sustainable returns for manufactures. We have also suggested reasons for the reluctance of some companies to employ digital strategies to transition from linear labour-intensive supply chains to supply networks. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, many organizations partially digitized their supply chains to sustain trading during what became a “new normal” of remote engagements. This suggested that digital enhancements could help spine companies improve their way of working, expand access to services, and deliver more valuable patient-clinician experiences. Dynamics within sectors usually change after a crisis. For example, following the 2008 economic crash, strong companies emerged stronger while weak companies emerged weaker. A defining difference between the strong and the weak was resilience: the ability not only to absorb shocks, but to use them to transform supply chains and enhance competitive advantage. Will spine companies emerge from the COVID-19 crisis stronger and extend their digitized supply networks or will they revert to their costly and inefficient labour-intensive linear supply chains? Keep an eye on the inventory-to-revenue ratio.

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7 years, 8 months ago

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The convergence of MedTech and pharma and the role of biosensors

HealthPad

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Medical Technology

Tags:

implantable biosensor device

medical technology

medtech

pharmaceutical companies

sensing technology

The convergence of MedTech and pharma can generate innovative combination devices that promise significant therapeutic and commercial benefits
Combination devices such as advanced drug delivery systems offer more precise, predictable and personalized healthcare
The global market for advanced drug delivery systems is US$196bn and growing
Biosensors play a role in convergence and innovative drug delivery systems
Roger Kornberg, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and 2006 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry describes the technological advances, which are shaping new medical therapies

The convergence of MedTech and pharma and the role of biosensors

MedTech and pharma companies are converging.
What role do biosensors play in such a convergence?

Traditionally, MedTech and big pharma have progressed along parallel paths. More recently, however, their paths have begun to converge in an attempt to gain a competitive edge in a radically changing healthcare landscape. Convergence leverages MedTech’s technical expertise and pharma’s medical and biological agents to develop combination devices. These are expected to significantly improve diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of 21^st century chronic lifetime diseases, and thereby make a substantial contribution to an evolving healthcare ecosystem that demands enhanced patient outcomes, and effective cost-containment.

Conventional diagnostics & drug delivery

Conventional in vitro diagnostics for common diseases are costly, time-consuming, and require centralized laboratories, experienced personnel and bulky equipment. Standard processes include the collection and transportation of biological samples from the point of care to a centralized laboratory for processing by experienced personnel. After the results become available, which usually takes days, the laboratory notifies doctors, who in turn contact patients, and modify their treatments as required. Conventional modes of treatment have mainly consisted of simple, fast-acting pharmaceuticals dispensed orally or as injectables. Such limited means of drug delivery slows the progress of drug development since most drugs are formulated to accommodate the conventional oral or injection delivery routes. Concerns about the quantity and duration of a drug’s presence, and its potential toxic effect on proximal non-diseased tissue drives interest in alternative drug delivery systems and fuels the convergence of MedTech and pharma.

The end of in vitro diagnostics

Roger Kornberg, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, reflects on the limitations of conventional in vitro diagnostics, and describes how technological advances facilitate rapid point-of-care diagnostics, which are easier and cheaper:

Converging interest

Illustrative of the MedTech-pharma convergence is Verily's (formerly Google Life Sciences) partnership with Novartis to develop smart contact lenses to correct presbyopia, (age-related farsightedness), and for monitoring diabetes by measuring glucose in tears. Otsuka’s, partnership with Proteus Digital Health is another example. This venture expects to develop an ingestible drug adherence device. Proteus already has a FDA-approved sensor, which measures medication adherence. Otsuka is embedding the Proteus’s sensor, which is the size of a sand particle, into its medication for severe mental illnesses in order to enhance drug adherence, which is a serious problem. 50% of prescribed medication in the US is not taken as directed, resulting in unnecessary escalation of conditions and therapies, higher costs to health systems, and a serious challenge for clinical studies.

Drivers of change

The principal drivers of MedTech-pharma convergence include scientific and technological advances, ageing populations, increased chronic lifestyle diseases, emerging-market expansion, and developments in therapies. All have played a role in changing healthcare demands and delivery landscapes. Responding to these changes, both MedTech and pharma have continued to emphasize growth, while attempting to enhance value for payers and patients. This has resulted in cost cutting, and a sharper focus on high-performing therapeutics. It has also fuelled MedTech-pharma convergence and the consequent development of combination devices. According to Deloitte’s 2016 Global Life Science Outlook, combination devices “will likely continue to rapidly increase in number and application”.

MedTech’s changing business model

Over the past two decades, MedTech has been challenged by tighter regulatory scrutiny, and continued pressure on healthcare budgets, but advantaged by technological progress, which it has embraced to create new business models. This has been rewarded by positive healthcare investment trends. Over a similar period, pharma has been challenged by the expiry of its patents, advances in molecular science, and changing demographics, but buoyed by increased healthcare spending trends, although the forces that increase health costs are being tempered by a demand for value.

As pharma has been increasingly challenged, so interest has increased in the potential of MedTech to address some of the more pressing healthcare demands in a radically changing healthcare ecosystem. Unlike pharma, MedTech has leveraged social, mobile, and cloud technologies to develop new business models and innovative devices for earlier diagnoses, faster and less invasive interventions, enhanced patient monitoring, and improved management of lifetime chronic conditions.

Such innovations are contributing to cheaper, faster, and more efficient patient care, and shifting MedTech’s strategic focus away from curative care, such as joint replacements, to improving the quality of life for patients with chronic long-term conditions. This re-focusing of its strategy has strengthened MedTech commercially, and is rapidly changing the way in which healthcare is delivered, the way health professionals treat patients, and the way patients’ experience healthcare.

Josh Shachar, founder of several successful US technology companies and author of a number of patents, describes the new healthcare ecosystem and some of the commercial opportunities it offers, which are predicated on the convergence of MedTech and pharma:

The decline of big pharma’s traditional business model

Pharma’s one-size-fits-all traditional business model, which has fuelled its commercial success over the past century, is based on broad population averages. This now is in decline as patents expire on major drugs, and product pipelines diminish. For example, over the past 30 years the expiry of pharma’s patents cost the industry some US$240bn.

Advances in genetics and molecular biology, which followed the complete sequencing of the human genome in 2003, revolutionized medicine and shifted its focus from inefficient one-size-fits-all drugs to personalized therapies that matched patients to drugs via diagnostic tests and biomarkers in order to improve outcomes, and reduce side effects. Already 40% of drugs in development are personalized medicines, and this is projected to increase to nearly 70% over the next five years.

Today, analysts transform individuals’ DNA information into practical data, which drives drug discovery and diagnostics, and tailors medicines to treat individual diseases. This personalized medicine aims to target the right therapy to the right patient at the right time, in order to improve outcomes and reduce costs, and is transforming how healthcare is delivered and diseases managed.

Personalized medicine

Personalized medicine has significantly dented pharma’s one-size-fits-all strategies. In general, pharma has been slow to respond to external shocks, and slow to renew its internal processes of discovery and development. As a result, the majority of new pharma drugs only offer marginal benefits. Today, pharma finds itself trapped in a downward commercial spiral: its revenues have plummeted, it has shed thousands of jobs, it has a dearth of one-size-fits-all drugs, and its replacement drugs are difficult-to-find, and when they are, they are too expensive.

Illustrative of the advances in molecular science that helped to destroy pharma’s traditional commercial strategy is the work of Kornberg. Here he describes an aspect of his work that is related to how biological information encoded in the genome is accessed to inform the direction of all human activity and the construction of organisms for which Kornberg received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2006, and created the foundations of personalized medicine:

Advanced drug delivery systems

Over the past 20 years, as pharma has struggled commercially and MedTech has shifted its business model, drug delivery systems have advanced significantly. Evolving sensor technologies have played a role in facilitating some of these advances, and are positioned to play an increasingly important role in the future of advanced drug delivery. According to BCC Research, the global market for advanced drug delivery systems, which increase bioavailability, reduce side effects, and improve patient compliance, increased from US$134bn in 2008 to some US$196bn in 2014.

The growth drivers for innovative drug delivery systems include recent advances of biological drugs such as proteins and nucleic acids, which have broadened the scope of therapeutic targets for a number of diseases. There are however, challenges.

Proteins are important structural and functional biomolecules that are a major part of every cell in your body. There are two nucleic acids: DNA and RNA. DNA stores and transfers genetic information, while RNA delivers information from DNA to protein-builders in the cells.

For instance, RNA is inherently unstable, and potentially immunogenic, and therefore requires innovative, targeted delivery systems. Such systems have benefitted significantly from progress in biomedical engineering and sensor technologies, which have enhanced the value of discoveries of bioactive molecules and gene therapies, and contributed to a number of new, advanced and innovative combination drug delivery systems, which promise to be more efficacious than conventional ones.

Biosensors

The use of biosensors in drug delivery system is not new. The insulin pump is one example. Introduced in its present form some 30 years ago, the insulin pump is a near-physiologic programmable method of insulin delivery that is flexible and lifestyle-friendly.

Biosensors are analytical tools, which convert biological responses into electrical signals. In healthcare, they provide analyses of chemical or physiological processes and transmit that physiologic data to an observer or to a monitoring device. Historically, data outputs generated from these devices were either analog in nature or aggregated in a fashion that was not conducive to secondary analysis. The latest biosensors are wearable and provide vital sign monitoring of patients, athletes, premature infants, children, psychiatric patients, people who need long-term care, elderly, and people in remote regions.

Increased accuracy and speed

The success of biosensors is associated with their ability to achieve very high levels of precision in measuring disease specific biomarkers both in vitro and in vivo environments. They use a biological element, such as enzymes, antibodies, receptors, tissues and microorganisms capable of recognizing or signalling real time biochemical changes in different inflammatory diseases and tumors. A transducer is then used to convert the biochemical signal into a quantifiable signal that can be transmitted, detected and analysed, and thereby has the potential, among other things, for rapid, accurate diagnosis and disease management.

Recent technological advances have led to the development of biosensors capable of detecting the target molecule in very low quantities and are considered to have enhanced capacity for increased accuracy and speed of diagnosis, prognosis and disease management. Biosensors are robust, inexpensive, easy to use, and more importantly, they do not require any sample preparation since they are able to detect almost any biomarker - protein, nucleic acid, small molecule, etc. - within a pool of other bimolecular substances. Recently, researchers have developed various innovative strategies to miniaturize biosensors so that they can be used as an active integral part of tissue engineering systems and implanted in vivo.

Market for biosensors

Over the past decade, the market in biosensors and bioinformatics has grown; driven by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), increased computer power, enhanced network connectivity, miniaturization, and large data storage capacity.

Today, biosensors represent a rapidly expanding field estimated to be growing at 60% per year, albeit from a low start. In addition to providing a critical analytical component for new drug delivery systems, biosensors are used for environmental and food analysis, and production monitoring. The estimated annual world analytical market is about US$12bn, of which 30% is in healthcare. There is a vast market expansion potential for biosensors because less than 0.1% of the analytical market is currently using them.

A significant impetus of this growth comes from the healthcare industry, where there is increasing demand for inexpensive and reliable sensors across many aspects of both primary and secondary healthcare. It is reasonable to assume that a major biosensor market will be where an immediate assay is required, and in the near-term patients will use biosensors to monitor and manage treatable lifetime conditions, such as diabetes cancer, and heart disease.

The integration of biosensors with drug delivery

The integration of biosensors with drug delivery systems supports improved disease management, and better patient compliance since all information in respect to a person’s medical condition may be monitored and maintained continuously. It also increases the potential for implantable pharmacies, which can operate as closed loop systems that facilitate continuous diagnosis, treatment and prognosis without vast data processing and specialist intervention. A number of diseases require continuous monitoring for effective management. For example, frequent measurement of blood flow changes could improve the ability of health care providers to diagnose and treat patients with vascular conditions, such as those associated with diabetes and high blood pressure. Further, physicochemical changes in the body can indicate the progression of a disease before it manifests itself, and early detection of illness and its progression can increase the efficacy of therapeutics.

Takeaways

Combination devices, which are triggered by the convergence of MedTech and pharma, offer substantial therapeutic and commercial opportunities. There is significant potential for biosensors in this convergence. The importance of biosensors is associated with their operational simplicity, higher sensitivity, ability to perform multiplex analysis, and capability to be integrated into different functions using the same chip. However, there remain non-trivial challenges to reconcile the demands of performance and yield to simplicity and affordability.