London NHS Trust Adopts NIPT

Premaitha Health plc has been awarded a contract to provide IONA®, its non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT), to St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in South West London. St George’s Hospital will be the first NHS facility to offer an in-house NIPT screening for pregnant women in the UK. The project award is a three-year contract with options to extend annually.

IONA, which requires a small blood sample rather than an invasive procedure such as an amniocentisis, uses next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology to estimate the risk of a foetus having serious genetic disorders such as Down syndrome (Trisomy 21), Edward syndrome (Trisomy 18) and Patau syndrome (Trisomy 13) by analysing cell-free foetal DNA from a sample of maternal blood.

Working in partnership, Premaitha and the Trust intend to establish St George’s NIPT service as a UK Centre of Excellence for Prenatal Screening enabling the Trust to offer this test to pregnant women through the NHS and also privately.

Professor Basky Thilaganathan, Consultant Obstetrician at St George’s commented, “This is great news for the Trust and for pregnant women in the UK. NIPT has the potential to make a huge difference to the care and reassurance that clinicians can offer to pregnant women. Too many have been through the anxiety and discomfort of invasive procedures after receiving false positive results from the combined test - the IONA® test gives us the accuracy and reliability to reduce this number significantly. We are very happy to be able to partner with a UK innovator like Premaitha to create a UK Centre of Excellence using the first regulated NIPT test.”