NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Ariosa Diagnostics announced today that it has inked a partnership with Advance Medical to offer its Harmony Prenatal Test to clinicians in Mexico.
The San Jose, Calif.-based firm said that Mexico is now one of 46 countries around the world where the Harmony test is available to healthcare providers. The Harrmony test is based on next-generation sequencing technology and provides a direct analysis of cell-free DNA in blood. According to Ariosa, the test has an accuracy rate above 99 percent for evaluating trisomy 21 risk, with a false positive rate of 0.1 percent.
Terms of the agreement with Advance Medical were not disclosed.
Canadian researchers recently said that they will use a C$10.5 million (US$10.2 million) government grant to compare non-invasive prenatal testing techniques for screening for chromosomal conditions such as Down syndrome. Ariosa's Harmony test, which is already available in Canada, was named as the only commercial genomic test involved in that study.