Shanghai experts lead nation-level non-invasive prenatal testing project
Shanghai medical experts have announced a nation-level project to develop non-invasive prenatal screening technology on fetus' multiple genetic diseases and introduce it into clinical practice.
The technology is the world's first non-invasive prenatal testing technology to include single-gene diseases, which are responsible for up to 12 percent of all inborn deformities.
By simply testing pregnant women's blood, the technology is expected to test all common and prevalent fetus' genetic diseases, helping achieve a more precise prenatal and perinatal management and reduce inborn deformity, said Huang Hefeng of Fudan University's Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, who is leading the research.
Dr Xu Chenming from the genetics center of Fudan University's Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital conducts an experiment on prenatal testing technology.
Huang said that incorporating single-gene disorders into prenatal screening is extremely important to improve the outcome and accuracy of prenatal genetic testing, as single-gene disorders are mainly new genetic mutations, which can't be detected by checking the parents and is a weak point in the current prenatal testing field.
In previous studies, Huang's team developed a new generation of non-invasive prenatal testing and conducted clinical trial on 1,090 pregnant women. The detecting rate on fetus' genetic disorders have increased by 60.7 percent compared with the previous technology and is able to identify 37 common single-gene diseases.
