PCR-Based Noninvasive Prenatal Diagnosis Using Fetal Cells in Maternal Circulation

It is a long-term goal of human genetics to develop prenatal diagnostic tests that are noninvasive and which do not constitute a risk to the mother or fetus. Such tests would be highly desirable compared with current techniques that require the sampling of fetal tissues by invasive measures such as amniocentests and chorionic villus sampling (CVS) that represent some risk to the fetus. One potentially noninvasive source of fetal cells for genetic analysis is fetal cells that have entered into maternal circulation during pregnancy (1,2.