Pregnancy screens get high-tech boost
A search for prenatal tests that are more accurate, faster and safer was inspired by a death in the family.
Matthew Rabinowitz was a technology pioneer who developed successful world wide web and GPS innovations. Then a family member gave birth to a child who was unexpectedly diagnosed with Down syndrome. The baby died after six days.
“I got involved partly because of what happened in my family, but it was partly I got tired of making things go ‘bing’ on the internet,” Rabinowitz stated in an interview.
He spoke Friday to fertility specialists at a conference in Toronto devoted to the latest advances in assisted reproductive technology such as in-vitro fertilization or IVF.
People are surrounded by technology, but few of those advances have found their way into having a healthy family, he said. 
Matthew Rabinowitz’s diagnostic technology has been called a paradigm shift in the field of fertility. Courtesy of Matthew Rabinowitz
Rabinowitz’s goal as CEO of Redwood City, Calif.-based Gene Security Network is to combine computing and molecular biology to give parents-to-be reliable information about the health of their baby as quickly as possible in the pregnancy.
“It really makes you feel like you are going to have a major impact on how people are going to live and think about genetic disease,” he said.
The company has two main types of prenatal products:
Current tests in pregnancy for Down syndrome do not detect a case about one out of six times, Rabinowitz said.
In comparison, the new approach takes advantage of a little trace of fetal DNA in a woman’s blood by combining data from computing, the human genome project and molecular biology.
The company stated the accuracy of its non-invasive prenatal screening for Down syndrome is about equivalent to invasive chorionic villi sampling, and could be done on a woman’s blood before 12 weeks into the pregnancy. Traditional tests such as amniocentesis and chorionic villi sampling are also invasive and carry about a 0.5 per cent risk of miscarriage.
In April, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced a $2-million allow to conduct a clinical trial of the non-invasive prenatal diagnosis technology, led by maternal and fetal specialist Dr. Ronald Wapner, vice-chair of research at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York.
The investigators plan to include Canadian clinics in the trial later.
Some specialists attending the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society meeting in Toronto were impressed by Rabinowitz’s approach.
“This is a paradigm shift in our capability to help people have healthy kids without risking multiple pregnancies,” stated Dr. Paul Claman, director of the Ottawa Fertility Centre.
Claman stated he anticipates the technology will be used at his clinic in the next five years, if Rabinowitz’s data is validated.
Currently, Gene Security Network’s lab will do a complex genetic analysis in about eight hours on embryos couriered to them for about $2,500, Claman said.
The history of molecular biology is filled with paradigm shifts that only occurred once physicists got involved, Claman noted.
While the non-invasive screening for all pregnancies generated excitement at the meeting, preimplanatation genetic diagnosis of embryos was a main topic on Friday.
Currently, Quebec grants a single embryo to be implanted for IVF cases that are publicly funded. People in other provinces are lobbying for IVF funding, which is driving the search for the “best” embryo to implant, stated Bentov.
“I think it’s an exciting era,” Bentov said, adding the approaches that are now being discussed were not possible two years ago.
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source : www.cbc.ca
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Submited at Saturday, September 24th, 2011 at 9:00 am on Health by ethan
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