ARUP Makes Natera’s Pre-natal Test Available

ARUP Laboratories, a national clinical and anatomic pathology reference laboratory, and Natera, a company that specializes in reproductive and prenatal genetic testing, have announced that Natera’s non-invasive prenatal screening test, Panorama, is now available to ARUP clients nationwide.

The test is available for the detection of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome), trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome) and select sex chromosome abnormalities such as monosomy X (Turner’s syndrome).

“Demand for non-invasive prenatal testing continues to grow, especially following the recommendation by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of use of the tests in high-risk pregnancies,” said Edward Ashwood, president and CEO of ARUP. “We are very pleased to partner with Natera to offer non-invasive prenatal testing to physicians and patients.”

ARUP is a national reference laboratory that provides tests to an extensive network of hospitals in the U.S. ARUP’s clients include more than half of the nation’s university teaching hospitals and children’s hospitals, as well as many other hospital networks and groups. Hospital laboratories provide patients with key tests that improve patient care and are expected to play an increasingly important role in patient treatment as the use of molecular diagnostics grows.

In clinical validation studies, Panorama demonstrated a sensitivity of greater than 99 percent when detecting common chromosomal abnormalities such as trisomy 21, trisomy 18 and trisomy 13; and 92 percent when detecting monosomy X. In addition, the Panorama test has had no false positives for all the syndromes tested in three clinical trials. The test uses fetal cell-free DNA found in maternal blood and works as early as nine weeks gestation. Panorama’s clinical validation data was presented at the annual Society of Maternal Fetal Medicine Meeting on Feb. 15, 2013.

Panorama’s technology analyzes, in a single reaction, 19,500 single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are the most informative portions of an individual’s DNA. It uses the Next-generation Aneuploidy Testing Using SNPs algorithm (NATUS), an advanced version of Natera’s proprietary informatics. Panorama has been validated globally and is currently being evaluated in several other clinical trials for the detection of genetic disorders, including trisomy 21, trisomy 18, trisomy 13, monosomy X, XXY, XYY, XXX and triploidy. The test uses a blood draw from the mother and can be performed within the first trimester of pregnancy, as early as nine weeks.