NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Arup Laboratories has become the latest lab to sign a deal to offer Natera's Panorama non-invasive prenatal screening test.
The firms jointly announced today that the test is now available through Arup's lab to customers nationwide. According to the firms, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Arup provides testing services to more than half of the nation's university teaching hospitals and children's hospitals, as well as other hospital networks and groups.
The Panorama test, which detects for trisomy 21, 18, and 13 and certain sex-chromosome abnormalities, was launched by San Carlos, Calif.-based Natera last month. In clinical validation studies, the test demonstrated sensitivity of greater than 99 percent for detecting trisomy 21, 18, and 13, and 92 percent when detecting monosomy X.
The agreement with Arup follows marketing deals inked earlier this year with Quest Diagnostics and Bio-Reference Laboratories.
Panorama competes with a handful of other noninvasive prenatal tests, including market leader Sequenom's MaterniT21 Plus; recent Illumina acquisition Verinata Health's Verifi; and Ariosa Diagnostics' Harmony Prenatal Test.
"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," Edward Ashwood, president and CEO of Arup, said in a statement.
Last November ACOG issued an opinion, along with the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine Publications Committee, that non-invasive prenatal testing using cell-free fetal DNA can be offered to patients who are at increased risk of aneuploidy.