bioMérieux: The BioFire Platform

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Yes, today, I'm looking to gain a solid understanding of the BioFire FilmArray platform, including the technology, how it works, its typical use, and the sales process. I also want to know about the typical customers who purchase it and how it compares to competitors. If I can leave today with this understanding, including the history of the platform, that would be ideal. Are you the right person to talk to about this?

What the FilmArray achieved was essentially the miniaturization of a Hologic or Roche machine into a small box the size of a slightly larger laptop. Inside this box, with microfluidics and pressure systems, you could perform a 25 to 30 parameter panel, which would otherwise require a huge lab machine. A large Hologic Panther, for instance, is a $50,000 to $100,000 investment. In contrast, the FilmArray could be sold for $5,000 to $10,000, and the panels were about $100 each. Although this is expensive per sample, it enabled a lot of clinically relevant determinations. Clinicians could rule out various respiratory viruses, look at panels of GI viruses and bacterial infections, and blood culture panels that identify what is present in a positive blood culture in terms of ID, which is crucial for therapy, whether it's gram-positive, gram-negative, or the type of bacteria.

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Yes, today, I'm looking to gain a solid understanding of the BioFire FilmArray platform, including the technology, how it works, its typical use, and the sales process. I also want to know about the typical customers who purchase it and how it compares to competitors. If I can leave today with this understanding, including the history of the platform, that would be ideal. Are you the right person to talk to about this?

This was particularly driven by clinicians, especially pediatricians in the beginning, because they focused on respiratory panels, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose, especially in children. It's challenging to determine whether a child has just a harmless virus or something more serious like RSV or the flu, which can significantly impact both children and elderly people. Another driving factor in the US specifically was the reimbursement. Under the original CPT codes, you could stack up all these parameters, and each one had a separate reimbursement. When it was launched around 2011, 2012, hospitals benefited financially due to high reimbursement rates, and clinicians loved it. That's why it was adopted so quickly and why BioFire grew into a billion-dollar company within just three years, capturing 90% of the market.

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I can imagine, yes, for sure.

But the point for all those fast urgent care diagnostics related to the sepsis workflow is that if you take away the time-to-result advantage, you lose the health economic benefit on the back end because then your patient is either dead or in the ICU before you have a result.

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