A team of researchers led by CHU de Quebec and Universite Laval, has received CAN$10.5 million from Genome Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Genome Quebec and other partners to conduct a large-scale comparative effectiveness study on non-invasive prenatal screening techniques. Dr. Francois Rousseau and his team will examine current prenatal screening practices for chromosomal conditions, such as Down syndrome, among pregnant women in Canada in order to improve screening approaches and avoid unnecessary procedures. Each year in Canada, about 450,000 women become pregnant and are offered Down syndrome prenatal screening using biochemical and ultrasound markers. The vast majority will be negative or low risk. However, for positive or high-risk results, those pregnant women are referred to amniocentesis, which is an invasive procedure done to confirm the screening result. Approximately 5% of all biochemical screening results are falsely positive, attributing to unnecessary invasive procedures that pose a 1 in 300 risk for miscarriage. The research project aims at independently comparing the performances of different such approaches that involve various combinations of the available tools for screening of chromosomal conditions, as well as to evaluate the cost-effectiveness, the ethical and social aspects of this new technology and to identify and adapt the best implementation tools for users in the health care system. The researchers will recruit 5600 pregnant women (3600 at high-risk of trisomy conditions and 2000 at low-risk). Samples from these women will be tested in parallel using different screening approaches that involve genomic-based NIPT, but also existing or new biochemical and ultrasound screening tools. The samples will be analyzed without knowledge of the true status of the pregnancy outcome. This will provide a comprehensive evaluation of the most efficient ways to improve the prenatal screening techniques widely used today.
