RE: Guess the market has caught wind of this10 Aug 2023 15:40
Copied from Precision Medicine volume 10 published 030823 , page 46.
NIPTs Set Out to Conquer the World
One of the biggest recent successes in the world of obstetrics has been the introduction of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in 2011. The market is estimated to be worth almost $4 billion now. But it is still mainly available to the well-off, or people who at least have insurance.
A lot of work is going into making NIPTs more widely available, cheaper, and more useful. One focus is helping clinical laboratories establish their own laboratory-developed tests and run their own NIPT service, says Joanne Mason, PhD, chief scientific officer at Yourgene Health. The company’s Nx NNIPT Workflow, which uses next generation sequencing, is such a solution.
This shift can cut costs and speed turnaround times. “Some results are available in 48 hours from sample receipt, compared to up to 14 days when NIPTs first became available in central reference labs in the U.S. and France,” she says.
Recently, she adds, Yourgene has also demonstrated the feasibility of prolonged storage in EDTA tubes, as opposed to expensive glass tubes.
There has also been an expansion of the clinical menu, with some tests including sex chromosome aneuploidies and microdeletions in addition to the standard three trisomies—21, 18, and 13.
But wider adoption of NIPT will continue to rely on reimbursement, access, and guidelines from professional bodies. In the U.K., Mason points out, the NHS has adopted NIPT into routine clinical antenatal screening for high-risk pregnancies, and it is part of National Screening Guidelines. This has made it much more widely available.
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