Natera, a leading innovator in prenatal genetic testing, today announced the initiation of a distribution partnership with ProPath, a wholly physician-owned provider of pathology services to clinicians and medical facilities in the United States, for its Panorama™ non-invasive prenatal screening test (NIPT).
Panorama has been validated globally in multiple clinical trials and is the only NIPT to consistently demonstrate high sensitivity and specificity for all major aneuploidies beyond Down syndrome, including trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome), trisomy18 (Edwards syndrome), triploidy and sex chromosome abnormalities. Panorama is now also able to screen for microdeletions, such as the 22q11.2 deletion (DiGeorge syndrome), which is caused by a small deletion on chromosome 22. DiGeorge results in a range of developmental problems, such as heart disease, cleft palate, learning disabilities as well as weak immune systems. The microdeletions screened for by Panorama occur with a combined incidence of approximately 1 in every 1,000 births, occur equally across all maternal ages, and for younger mothers are more prevalent than Down syndrome.
"We have seen increasing demand for non-invasive prenatal testing, and we are proud to offer Panorama with its ability to more accurately and comprehensively screen for abnormalities than conventional tests," said Kenneth E. Youens, M.D., director of women's health for ProPath. "We look forward to rolling out this test quickly and making it available to our medical facilities and clinicians nationwide."
