By Diagnostics World Staff
July 13, 2018 | PerkinElmer has announced a collaboration with Women & Infants Hospital (WIH) of Rhode Island, a Care New England hospital, to evaluate an innovative test method using PerkinElmer’s Vanadis NIPT system. The Vanadis NIPT system is under development and not available for clinical use in the United States.
Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) using cell-free DNA (cfDNA) has become the standard follow-up procedure for women classified as high risk following traditional prenatal screening and other national guidelines indicating risk for aneuploidy. Unlike existing NIPT technologies which require more complex platforms such as sequencing or microarrays, the Vanadis NIPT platform is designed to simplify screening for trisomies 21 (Down syndrome), 18 (Edwards syndrome) and 13 (Patau syndrome). This cost-effective, high-throughput scalable platform measures fetal chromosomal trisomies in maternal plasma by labeling and counting specific cfDNA fragments using imaging – removing the costly and data-intensive steps required for sequencing or microarray solutions.
The VALUE (Validation of a Lower Cost Aneuploidy Screen) study is funded through a contract with Women & Infants Hospital, but the design, implementation, analyses and reporting is the sole responsibility of the study staff at Women & Infants. The research study aims to test samples from approximately 2,650 women, most from an average risk pregnancy population, with additional high-risk cases added to determine performance characteristics such as detection rates and false positive rates. Turnaround time, associated costs, fetal sex determination, and quality metrics will also be examined. Women & Infants will serve as the primary study center and laboratory site. Fourteen enrollment sites across North America are currently participating in the VALUE study.
“All pregnant women should have access to reliable, low-cost NIPT as a follow-up to aneuploidy screening, but this has not previously been possible, as the current approaches are complex, have limited capacity and require the expertise of specialized genetic laboratories,” said Linh Hoang, Vice President of Reproductive Health at PerkinElmer, in a press release. “By incorporating novel technology and analytics, the Vanadis assay has the potential to fundamentally change the cost structure and workflow for NIPT and give more women access to cfDNA screening. Our solution is designed to make it simpler for any laboratory to provide high-precision NIPT with a fully automated platform that they can integrate into their current screening programs and workflow.”
“We believe that it is important that prenatal screening be under local laboratory control rather than concentrated in a few large commercial laboratories. The Vanadis technology requires less upfront investment as well as non-specialized laboratory space and technicians. It has the potential to be as efficient as current next generation sequencing offerings, yet could be cost-competitive with current serum-based screening,” Glenn Palomaki, associate director of the Division of Medical Screening and Special Testing at Women & Infants Hospital and professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said in an official statement.
PerkinElmer obtained the proprietary NIPT technology through its acquisition of Vanadis Diagnostics. A research study, “Imaging Single DNA Molecules for High Precision NIPT” (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22606-0), recently published Nature Scientific Reports described the Vanadis NIPT technology and presented data on the feasibility of applying the assay for detection of fetal trisomy 21 in maternal plasma.