SALT LAKE CITY (PRWEB)
February 03, 2022

Preterm birth — defined as any birth before 37 weeks’ gestation — is the leading cause of newborn morbidity and mortality, affecting more than 1 in 10 children born in the United States, according to the 2021 March of Dimes Report Card. That’s why Sera Prognostics., Inc, The Pregnancy Company®, joined Mediaplanet’s Journey to Parenthood campaign in an effort to help expecting parents and their healthcare providers identify and mitigate the risks associated with preterm births.

Most expecting parents and virtually all obstetricians know of the considerable risks associated with preterm birth, but not all are familiar with the updated technologies and prognostic innovations now available that can drastically improve the identification of those at increased risk. Sera Prognostics’ breakthrough, non-invasive prenatal PreTRM Test gives parents and medical professionals a means to accurately predict the risk of a preterm birth and is the only broadly clinically validated and commercially available blood test of its kind.

While well-known proactive care management options have proven effective at reducing preterm births and in improving outcomes, identifying higher-risk patients is difficult with the currently used methods available. Today, 80 percent of patients who deliver early go undetected by traditional assessment methods like cervical-length screening and prior preterm birth history. Sera Prognostics’ PreTRM Test tackles this clinical challenge head-on.

Research at Sera Prognostics has found that two placentally expressed proteins (Insulin-like Growth Factor Binding Protein and Sex Hormone Binding Globulin) are powerful predictors of spontaneous preterm birth. The PreTRM Test analyzes these proteins in asymptomatic singleton pregnancies to accurately identify a woman’s risk of delivering preterm. The non-invasive test is not dangerous to the fetus or mother; it only requires a single blood draw at 19-20 weeks. Test results are reported to the provider in about a week’s time.

“Despite all the advances in obstetrical diagnostics and therapeutics over the past 10 years, preterm birth remains the major factor in neonatal morbidity and mortality,” said Dr. Lee Shulman, M.D., FACOG, FACMG. “The value of the PreTRM Test cannot be overestimated. The ability to identify those who may be at risk for preterm birth from the large pool of low-risk women is of incredible value.”

Knowing a patient’s risk of a preterm birth is important because it is actionable. When a higher-risk pregnancy is detected, proactive intervention has been shown to improve adverse outcomes associated with preterm birth. The recent PREVENT-PTB prospective study found that implementing risk-reduction protocols in higher-risk pregnancies reduced severe morbidity and mortality rates by up to 66 percent in pregnancies with prematurity complications. Additionally, the study observed greater than 70 percent reduction in time premature babies spent in the NICU by detecting higher-risk pregnancies that were given proactive interventions, which can result in a significantly lower cost of neonatal care after a preterm birth. This has a tremendous reverberating impact on the child, the family, and the healthcare system.

Learn more about the PreTRM Test and how it can help healthcare providers and parents better understand individual preterm birth risk by reading Sera Prognostics’ article in Mediaplanet’s Family at Home campaign, which can be found online here: https://bit.ly/32fYpAk

About Sera Prognostics, Inc.

Sera Prognostics is a leading health diagnostics company dedicated to improving the lives of women and babies through precision pregnancy care. Sera’s mission is to deliver early, pivotal information in pregnancy to physicians, enabling them to improve the health of their patients, resulting in reductions in the costs of healthcare delivery. Sera has a robust pipeline of innovative diagnostic tests focused on the early prediction of preterm birth risk and other complications of pregnancy. Sera’s precision medicine PreTRM® test reports to a physician the individualized risk of spontaneous premature delivery in a pregnancy, enabling earlier proactive interventions in women with higher risk. Sera Prognostics is located in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to the Company’s partnership with Mediaplanet and Industry leaders. These “forward-looking statements” are based on management’s current expectations of future events and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those set forth in or implied by forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: net losses, cash generation, and the potential need to raise more capital; revenues from the PreTRM test representing substantially all Company revenues to date; the need for broad scientific and market acceptance of the PreTRM test; a concentrated number of material customers; our ability to introduce new products; potential competition; our proprietary biobank; critical suppliers; the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on our operations, as well as the business or operations of third parties with whom we conduct business; estimates of total addressable market opportunity and forecasts of market growth; potential third-party payer coverage and reimbursement; new reimbursement methodologies applicable to the PreTRM test, including new CPT codes and payment rates for those codes; changes in FDA regulation of laboratory-developed tests; the intellectual property rights protecting our tests and market position; and other factors discussed under the heading “Risk Factors” contained in our Final Prospectus on Form S-1, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 14, 2021, as well as any updates to those risk factors filed from time to time in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Annual Reports on Form 10-K, or Current Reports on Form 8-K. All information in this press release is as of the date of the release, and the Company undertakes no duty to update this information unless required by law.

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