Quest Diagnostics QNatal Advanced

Quest Diagnostics has launched QNatal Advanced, a noninvasive prenatal screening service for detecting chromosomal abnormalities in high-risk pregnancies.

QNatal Advanced is a lab-developed test using massively parallel shotgun sequencing with GC correction. It analyzes cell-free fetal DNA in circulating maternal blood to screen for common and rare chromosomal abnormalities, including those associated with trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome), trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome), and monosomy X (Turner syndrome), as well as fetal sex aneuploidies and select copy number variants. The test can be used as early as 10 weeks into gestation.

With results of a QNatal Advanced screen, a woman and her physician may be better positioned to assess the appropriateness of invasive diagnostic testing such as amniocentesis to confirm a finding, Quest said.

More about QNatal Advanced can be found here.