#Harmony test cost 2017 professional#

More particularly, this case helps us to see that biomedical professionals adopting NIPT in ‘local worlds of PT’ in Vienna and actors envisioning NIPT in geographically more distant worlds converged in mobilizing extant values, practices, and materialities, transforming extant elements of an ‘imaginary of PT’ into an infrastructure that facilitated the emergence of NIPT. It allows us to shed some light on the enmeshing of the global, the national, and the local the moral and the material (Löwy 2015, 2017) and new genomic tools and players and established technical devices and experts in the emergence and diffusion of NIPT (Gibbon et al. While the subpolitical nature of this case does not allow us to generalize findings to Austria as a whole, it can help us to get some clues on why and how NIPT could emerge and travel so quickly in practice.

#Harmony test cost 2017 professional#

Moreover, the adoption of NIPT has also been regulated not via new provisions of national health care authorities but by the protocols of local providers and the recommendations of professional societies (Schmid et al. In the words of a biomedical professional, it is “still a luxury test” (Interview 6/2018), as the cost is approximately 600 euros per test, which most women pay out of pocket or via private insurance. NIPT is not a widespread phenomenon in quantitative terms. It emerged from below, when two public hospitals, dozens of private centres for PT and a few gynaecologists began to adopt NIPT, sending blood samples to commercial laboratories abroad. So far, NIPT has not been rolled out in a top-down way across the Austrian territory as a whole. In this region, the emergence of NIPT has been a fairly “subpolitical” (Vries 2007) phenomenon. Yet, why? How could NIPT emerge and travel so quickly? This article seeks to begin to answer these questions by engaging with the emergence of NIPT in and around Vienna, the capital city of Austria, and parts of the surrounding regions of Lower Austria and the Burgenland. Since then, NIPT has travelled with remarkable speed around the globe, becoming “the vanguard of genomic medicine” (Hui and Bianchi 2017).

NIPT began to emerge in 2011, when companies in California and China launched the first tests for foetal aneuploidies. A combination of genomic platforms and bioinformatics can transform the short fragments of DNA into information about quantifiable properties of the foetal genome, ranging from foetal trisomies, such as Down syndrome (trisomy 21), to sex-chromosome anomalies, and to micro-deletion syndromes.

Instead, NIPT capitalizes on the presence of cell-free foetal DNA (cffDNA) in the blood of pregnant women, where it circulates next to women’s own cell-free DNA (cfDNA). Unlike invasive procedures, such as amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling (CVS), it does not require puncturing the pregnant woman’s belly with a needle to access foetal DNA. NIPT is a new practice in prenatal testing (PT). This article engages with the emergence of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for foetal aneuploidies, focusing on the region in and around Vienna, the capital city of Austria. Thus, various actors converged in mobilizing moral and material elements of an imaginary, transforming them into an infrastructure that facilitated the travels of NIPT, while also shaping its use. Third, the article argues that elements of this imaginary were also mobilized by commercial pioneers of NIPT, who ‘infrastructurized’ extant values, practices, and networks among biomedical professionals. Second, in so doing, NIPT could travel on a moral and material ground, or an ‘imaginary of PT’, built in the past. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews, documents, and field notes, it argues, first, that NIPT could travel so quickly because it travelled as ‘adaptable boxes’ that added on to different ‘local worlds of prenatal testing (PT)’, without disrupting them.

This article engages with the emergence of NIPT in and around Vienna, the capital city of Austria, to explore why and how this technology could travel so quickly in practice. Since its market introduction in 2011, it has travelled around the globe with remarkable speed.

Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is a new technology used in prenatal testing (PT) that capitalizes on genomic platforms to transform DNA fragments in the blood of pregnant women into information about the genome of a foetus.