Illumina, Inc. today announced that Verinata Health, an Illumina company, has published the first peer-reviewed study of non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) performance in a clinical laboratory setting.
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The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics has just released an important new Policy Statement on "Noninvasive Prenatal Screening for Fetal Aneuploidy."
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A new category of non-invasive genetic screening tests is gaining a great deal of interest in the medical field – including from Quest Diagnostics -- for its potential to help screen women during pregnancy for genetic abnormalities known as trisomies, the most common of which is Down syndrome.
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In a study to be presented on February 15 between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. PST, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting -, in San Francisco, California, researchers from Tufts Medical Center will present findings showing the effects of maternal obesity on a fetus, specifically in the development of the brain.
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Researchers have developed a new screening test that allows detection of fetal abnormalities in maternal blood by deep sequencing cell-free DNA extracted from plasma.
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Chromosomal microarray analysis is able to identify significantly more clinically relevant information for prenatal diagnosis than is karyotyping, and is equally able to highlight aneuploidies and unbalanced rearrangements, US study findings suggest.
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A large, multi-center clinical trial led by researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) shows that a new genetic test resulted in significantly more clinically relevant information than the current standard method of prenatal testing.
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A study in mice has shown that large numbers of vascular endothelial cells can be generated from human amniotic fluid-derived cells.
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A new approach for generating large numbers of circulatory system cells, known as vascular endothelial cells (VECs), from human amniotic-fluid-derived cells (ACs) is reported in a study published by Cell Press October 18th in the journal Cell. The strategy, which shows promise in mice, opens the door to establishing a vast inventory of VECs for promoting organ regeneration and treating diverse vascular disorders.
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A research team at Weill Cornell Medical College has discovered a way to utilize diagnostic prenatal amniocentesis cells, reprogramming them into abundant and stable endothelial cells capable of regenerating damaged blood vessels and repairing injured organs.
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A study published in The Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine demonstrates that the fraction of fetal cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in maternal blood is unaffected by the mother's presumed risk for trisomy, offering support for the use of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for detecting genetic conditions such as Down syndrome in a broad patient population.
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Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have for the first time sequenced the genome of an unborn baby using only a blood sample from the mother.
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Stem cells found in amniotic fluid can be transformed into a more versatile state similar to embryonic stem cells, according to a study published today in the journal Molecular Therapy. Scientists from Imperial College London and the UCL Institute of Child Health succeeded in reprogramming amniotic fluid cells without having to introduce extra genes.
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Current screening strategies for Down syndrome, caused by fetal trisomy 21 (T21), and Edwards syndrome, caused by fetal trisomy 18 (T18), have false positive rates of 2 to 3%, and false negative rates of 5% or higher. Positive screening results must be confirmed by amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling, which carry a fetal loss rate of approximately 1 in 300 procedures. Now an international, multicenter cohort study finds that a genetic test to screen for trisomy 21 or 18 from a maternal blood sample is almost 100% accurate.
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LifeCodexx today announced the successful completion of the clinical validation study of its noninvasive test method for the detection of fetal trisomy 21 from maternal blood using Next Generation sequencing.
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Using a noninvasive test on maternal blood that deploys a novel biochemical assay and a new algorithm for analysis, scientists can detect, with a high degree of accuracy, the risk that a fetus has the chromosomal abnormalities that cause Down syndrome and a genetic disorder known as Edwards syndrome.
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Campaigning in Ohio on Saturday, Rick Santorum displayed his culture-warrior side in full force ... He lambasted the president's health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, "because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society".
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Researchers at Rice University and Texas Children's Hospital have turned stem cells from amniotic fluid into cells that form blood vessels. Their success offers hope that such stem cells may be used to grow tissue patches to repair infant hearts.
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A new research study published in the January 2012 edition of The FASEB Journal describes findings that could lead to a non-invasive test that would let expecting mothers know the sex of their baby as early as the first trimester.
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Pregnant mothers in the U.S. who wish to know whether they're carrying a fetus with Down syndrome now have access to a commercial genetic blood test that has a 99 per cent accuracy rate.
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