VCU news

Virginia Commonwealth University is part of an international research team that contributed to a discovery of a noninvasive way to detect Down syndrome mentioned in Time magazine as one of the Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs for 2008.

The team, composed of researchers based at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in China and VCU in the United States, developed a noninvasive diagnostic method for Down syndrome that uses a sample of blood from a pregnant woman.

The results may one day lead to a fast, accurate and noninvasive method for prenatal testing for Down syndrome, which occurs when an individual has three rather than two copies of chromosome 21.

Current methods available to test for Down syndrome, as well as to detect other genetic disorders prenatally, include amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling, or CVS. Both are invasive and pose a risk of miscarriage.

The discovery was recently reported online in the December 2008 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Similar findings in a separate study were reported in October 2008 by researchers at Stanford University in California.