Which suppliers are growing in the bioactive small molecules market?
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- Which suppliers are leading in the bioactive molecules market?
- Which supplier is showing noticeable growth?
- What are the reasons for supplier success in this market?
Updated May 2025
Bioactive small molecules is a vital research market in the life sciences, full of interesting trends to dissect.
For this analysis, we give an updated look into citation share for leading suppliers in the bioactive molecules market over the past five years, delving into country and product data.
Looking into this market led us to learn more about the rise of a specific supplier. In this blog, we uncover how this supplier has grown in relation to other leading reagent suppliers, and how they may have done achieved this growth.
Who are the leaders in the bioactive small molecules market?
The bioactive small molecule market is dominated by MiliporeSigma, who hold a significant 48.65% share as of 2024. They are seeing a decreasing market share in more recent years, but remain leaders in the market.
Joining them in the top five are Selleck Chemicals, MedChemExpress, Tocris Bioscience and Thermo Scientific.
Beyond MilliporeSigma’s lion share of citations, the other leading suppliers have switched their rankings over the years and seen both growing and shrinking citation share.
Suppliers increasing their citation share up until 2020 include Cayman Chemicals and Abcam. Bringing the analysis up to date, we found that Thermo Fisher Scientific and Selleck Chemicals had been seeing growth in recent years.
Of particular note, we began to pick out one supplier with a significantly increasing citation share from 2017 all the way through to 2024: MedChemExpress.
The rise of MedChemExpress
As the self-titled ‘master of bioactive molecules’ MedChemExpress certainly have been making moves in the market to validate this claim. Founded in 2013, they have risen through the ranks and in 2024, they claimed a share of over 13%. This represents huge growth from their share of below 4% in 2020. We also recently reported on their position as the 6th most cited supplier in the overall biochemicals market.
As a result of this impressive citation share growth, MedChemExpress overtook many prominent biochemical suppliers, including: Cayman Chemicals, Avanti Polar Lipids, Abcam, Vector Laboratories and Santa Cruz in the period of 2017-2021, and now are ranked as the second most cited supplier in the market.
So, how have MedChemExpress grown in this market so significantly?
How have MedChemExpress increased their citation share?
Growth in China
A contributing factor to the substantial citation share growth for MedChemExpress could be their considerable growth in the Chinese market. Here MedChemExpress have risen from a rank of 11th (0.77%) in 2017 to 2nd (16.13%) in 2021, and finally to 1st position in 2023. This has meant that they have overtaken the likes of Tocris, MilliporeSigma and SelleckChem in China.
Their strong performance in China could therefore explain, to an extent, their growth. Of note, these mentioned competitors are showing an overall decline in citation share in the Chinese market.
Growth in the US
Another extremely important global market for life science research is of course the US. Here, MedChemExpress have grown from 19th (0.27%) in 2017 to 6th position.
Other challengers are showing growth in the US bioactive small molecules market. Currently, however, this does not appear to be slowing their growth. Companies growing in the US include Thermo Fisher and Cayman Chemicals.
Download data on the bioactive small molecules market
Interested in taking a look at the data for yourself? By simply signing up below, you will receive a free data download of the top ten suppliers in the bioactive small molecules market, with their citation share breakdown from 2017-2021.
- Rebecca and the CiteAb team
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