An enormous marketplace for uncommon situations
Between 2011 and 2013, a small Silicon Valley-based biotech firm, Sequenom, tripled in dimension. The important thing to its success: MaterniT21, a brand new prenatal screening take a look at that did remarkably properly at detecting Down syndrome.
Older screening assessments took months and required a number of blood assessments. This new one generated fewer false positives with a single blood draw.
The take a look at may additionally decide the intercourse of a fetus. It rapidly grew to become successful. “You had individuals strolling in saying, ‘I need this intercourse take a look at,’” recalled Dr. Anjali Kaimal, a maternal-fetal drugs specialist at Massachusetts Normal Hospital.
Rivals started launching their very own assessments. Immediately, analyst estimates of the market’s dimension vary from $600 million into the billions, and the variety of ladies taking these assessments is predicted to double by 2025.
As firms started on the lookout for methods to distinguish their merchandise, many determined to start out screening for extra and rarer problems. All of the screenings may run on the identical blood draw, and docs already order many assessments throughout brief prenatal care visits, that means some most likely thought little of tacking on a number of extra.
For the testing firm, nonetheless, including microdeletions can double what an insurer pays — from a mean of $695 for the fundamental assessments to $1,349 for the expanded panel, in accordance with the well being knowledge firm Live performance Genetics. (Sufferers whose insurance coverage didn’t totally cowl the assessments describe being billed wildly totally different figures, starting from a number of hundred to hundreds of {dollars}.)
However these situations had been so uncommon that there have been few situations for the assessments to search out.
Take Natera, which ran 400,000 assessments in 2020 for DiGeorge syndrome, a dysfunction related to coronary heart defects and mental incapacity.