HONG KONG, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- Researchers in China say doctors may soon be able to diagnose a baby's genetic health simply by taking a blood sample from the mother.
Scientists in Hong Kong have pieced together the entire genetic blueprint of an unborn baby from fragments of DNA found in the mother's blood and were able to determine the baby's genetic makeup well enough to test for a genetic disease, ScienceNews.org reported Wednesday.
A group led by Y.M. Dennis Lo, a chemical pathologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, found that bits of fetal DNA can be found in the mother's blood, and in fact about 10 percent of DNA found in a pregnant woman's blood plasma actually comes from the fetus.
The accomplishment is a "tour de force," Laird Jackson, a medical geneticist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said. "It's opened the door on something that people have dreamed about for a while."
Determining a baby's genetic makeup from a mother's blood sample could circumvent the need for invasive procedures such as amniocentesis, Sinuhe Hahn, a molecular biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, says.
Such procedures now used for prenatal genetic testing result in miscarriages in about 1 percent of cases, Hahn says.
The new technique would be much safer and could provide an unprecedented wealth of genetic information about the fetus, he says.
"This technology is so revolutionary that we're going to have to involve regulatory agencies and have ethical discussions" about how such genetic information should be used, Hahn says.
