Natera, a leading innovator in prenatal genetic testing, and Echevarne, a leading clinical analysis laboratory in Spain, today announced the signing of a distribution agreement for Echevarne to offer Natera's non-invasive prenatal screening test (NIPT), Panorama™, through its facilities in Spain. Panorama was launched in March 2013 for the detection of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome), trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome) and select sex chromosome abnormalities, such as monosomy X (Turner's syndrome).
Panorama uses a simple blood draw from the mother, examines cell-free DNA found in maternal blood originating from both mother and fetus, and can be performed within the first trimester of pregnancy, as early as nine weeks, without any risk to the fetus. Panorama's technology analyzes, in a single reaction, 19,500 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are the most informative portions of an individual's DNA. It utilizes the NATUS [Next-generation Aneuploidy Testing Using SNPs] algorithm, an advanced version of Natera's proprietary informatics.
