Stephane Budel
I track the market forces that turn -omics progress into clinical adoption — or prevent it from happening — and the long road from sick-care to healthcare. As Founding Partner at DeciBio, I have spent two decades advising the companies, investors, and executives building the tools and diagnostics layer of precision medicine.
"The precision medicine revolution will be driven by life science tools and diagnostics."
The end of an era
Since 2019, the life science tools and diagnostics space has moved through six distinct eras — from NicheOmics to the emerging "ClinOmics." We are now at the handoff from "MarginOmics" to "ClinOmics," where clinical pull begins driving tool spend.
NicheOmics
Under the radar
SwabRush
Diagnostics to the rescue
GenomicWinter
The reckoning
LiquidLift
Liquid biopsy leads
MarginOmics
Specialty Dx catches up
ClinOmics →
Clinical pull drives tool spend
The Adoption Index
Where eight precision-medicine technologies sit on the adoption curve each year, read from the research literature. Click any cell for the detail.
| Technology | ’06 | ’07 | ’08 | ’09 | ’10 | ’11 | ’12 | ’13 | ’14 | ’15 | ’16 | ’17 | ’18 | ’19 | ’20 | ’21 | ’22 | ’23 | ’24 | ’25 | ’26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NGS | |||||||||||||||||||||
| scRNA-seq | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Spatial Tx | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Long-read | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Spatial Proteo | |||||||||||||||||||||
| cfDNA | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Multi-omics | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hi-Plex M-O |
“Late Majority” and “Laggards” are Rogers’ terms for a saturated, standard-infrastructure stage — the remaining non-adopters in a now-ubiquitous technology, not a declining or failing one. NGS sits here precisely because it has become routine.
Faded cells = 2026 (partial year, annualized — provisional). Click any cell for detail.
From the field
Shorter observations from conferences, conversations, and moments of market clarity.
I joined The Principal Podcast to talk about building a category-leading firm. The host wanted the consulting version; the deeper principle is the same one that decides winners in tools and diagnostics — in complex, technical markets, deep domain expertise is the most durable moat there is. And AI makes it more valuable, not less.
June 2026Three days at TD Cowen's Tools/Dx "Revolution," where AI was the whole conversation. The contrarian read: AI is a demand multiplier for the wet lab, not its executioner — and the defensible value is migrating off the assay into the workflow, the data, and the reimbursement access around it.
June 2026We built a tool that reads how NGS diffused through 98,000 papers, then checked it against our bottom-up model of the $7.3B market. The two agree — and the publications got there first.
Thinking
For the rest of us in this industry we love dearly, it must be a command: act now, or watch the infrastructure behind tomorrow's cures erode. Tools and diagnostics save lives. It's time to pay and plan like they do.
Read essay →What's missing is a shared drive to fight for diagnostics to be seen, valued, and prioritized. And yes, even lobbied for. If we want to reduce healthcare costs and improve outcomes, we must invest (smartly and boldly) in diagnostics.
Read essay →About
Stephane Budel is a life sciences strategy advisor focused on tools, diagnostics, genomics, and precision medicine.
Founding Partner at DeciBio. PhD from Yale. Writing about how technologies become markets, how diagnostics shape care, and why the infrastructure of precision medicine is undervalued.
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