No US commercial NIPS labs fully follow ACMG’s 2016 guidelines

None of the commercial laboratories that offer prenatal cell-free DNA screening (also known as non-invasive prenatal screening, or NIPS) in the United States follow all of the guidance from ACMG (the American College of Medical Genetics & Genomics). A new study published in Genetics in Medicine by a multidisciplinary group of experts assessed materials from all the US labs currently offering NIPS, and found a great deal of variability in their adherence to the 2016 ACMG guidelines.

In a press release, Brian Skotko, MD, of MassGeneral Hospital for Children, the paper’s lead author, noted, “It’s been more than two years since the ACMG published its recommendations about NIPS, and we could not find a single commercial lab in the U.S. that adhered to all of the recommendations.”

While multiple professional societies have issued recommendations for offering and returning results from NIPS, the 2016 ACMG recommendations were unique in providing guidance not only for health care providers, but also for laboratories marketing and conducting NIPS.

The authors of this just-published study included several of the experts who contributed to the 2016 ACMG recommendations, and also included several PIRC members with expertise in bioethics and patient/provider education. The table detailing the results is publicly available here on the PIRC website, and the group has pledged to update this table as new information is made available.

The original article (available to Genetics in Medicine subscribers) is available online:

Skotko BG, Allyse M, Bajaj K, Best BG, Klugman S, Leach M, Meredith S, Michie M, Stoll K, Gregg AR. Adherence of Cell-free DNA Noninvasive Prenatal Screens to ACMG Recommendations. Genetics in Medicine online advance publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41436-019-0485-2