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Non invasive pre natal testing is growing up

20 December, 2014

The ever-changing world of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing has seen some interesting developments over the last week, particularly in the US. First of all, Roche Diagnostics decided they could no longer ignore this growing market and announced their acquisition of Ariosa Diagnostics. Of particular note here, is that Ariosa will be moving away from using Illumina’s NGS platforms for their testing, preferring to use a microarray-based technique relying on Affymetrix’s kit. 

NIPT

The IP landscape also continues to be complex. Ariosa remains entangled in disputes with Sequenom and Verinata, now owned by Illumina, amongst others. The big news in the NIPT IP world recently was the settlement between Illumina and Sequenom which has resulted in a shared pool of IP assets. That news, and Sequenom’s continued progress towards profit has seen their market cap increase by 30% over the last month. Illumina continues to make strides towards owning the NIPT market, though, buoyed by recent deals with LabCorp and VCGS, which will further extend their market coverage.

We at Sagentia have used our algorithm, data processing, and medical grade software capabilities to develop the custom clinical bioinformatics analysis application that performs the test analysis, computes test results and generates test reports.

Back on this relatively calmer side of the pond, one product soon to reach the market which will not use Illumina’s hardware is Premaitha Health’s IONA test. We at Sagentia have used our algorithm, data processing and medical grade software capabilities to develop the custom clinical bioinformatics analysis application that performs the test analysis, computes test results and generates test reports. Premaitha re-iterated today that the IONA test is expected to receive its CE-mark in January following positive feedback on their quality systems and regulatory strategy from potential adopters and regulators. This test should, therefore, help to address the recently reported issue of quality control, as it has both a higher detection rate and a lower false positive rate.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this fast growing market, which Renub Research estimates will expand by 150% over the next 5 years. But whatever goes on between the players in this space, the technological advances taking place are exciting and have the potential to offer real benefits for patients. Watch this space for further updates!

 

Paul Wilkins

SVP Medical

 

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