NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Premaitha Health is providing noninvasive prenatal testing services to Servicios Genéticos OriGen, a private laboratory group in Santiago, Chile, the company said today.
Under the agreement, OriGen will send maternal blood samples to Premaitha's clinical laboratory in Manchester, UK, which will analyze them using the firm's Iona test, which estimates the fetal risk for trisomies 21, 18, and 13. Following the testing process, which takes three days, Premaitha will send the test results to OriGen.
The partnership is Premaitha's first outside of Europe. It has licensed the Iona test, which is CE-marked, to several laboratories, both in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
One reason OriGen teamed up with Premaitha is apparently the fast turnaround time it offers. "Other NIPT testing services can have a time to result of over two weeks, so the Iona test is a big improvement which we can now offer to pregnant women here in Chile," said Sebastian Salinas, general manager of OriGen, in a statement.