A New Method of SARS-CoV-2 Screening for Pregnant Women Based on Non-Invasive Prenatal Test

Siyuan Linpeng1#, Xu Li2#, Xu Yang3, Shihao Zhou1, Xiufen Bu1, Can Peng1, Jiyang Liu4* and Jun He1*

1Changsha Hospital for Maternal & Child Health Care Affiliated to Hunan Normal University, China
2Department of Basic Medicine, Yiyang Medical College, China
3Southern Medical University; Guangzhou Darui Biotehnology Co., Ltd. Guangzhou, China
4The First Hospital of Changsha, Changsha, China
#These authors contributed equally to this work

^*Correspondance to: Jun He 

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Abstract:

Aims: Developing a new system to detect SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid and fetal aneuploidy at the same time base on maternal plasma, to achieve the purpose of SARS-CoV-2 screening for pregnant women. Methods: We optimized the Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) library by mixing the cell-free DNA (cfDNA) and SARS-CoV-2 cDNA as the input DNA to make the NIPT library. Three groups of libraries were set up, including negative group, trisomy positive group, and simulated SARSCoV- 2 group to detect SARS-CoV-2 and NIPT, and three different SARS-CoV-2 concentration gradients were set up in the simulated SARS-CoV-2 group. Results: For NIPT analysis, negative NIPT result was confirmed in all cases in the negative group and simulated SARS-CoV-2 group, while positive NIPT result was confirmed in all cases in the trisomy positive group. For SARS-CoV-2 analysis, SARS-CoV-2 reads were detected in all cases in simulated SARS-CoV-2 group, and none SARS-CoV-2 reads were detected in the negative group and trisomy positive group. All the results were consistent with the actual situation. In addition, the detected viral reads had significant positive correlation with the proportion of SARS-CoV-2 reads in 1 million total reads. Conclusion: The new technology reported in this study can achieve the purpose of NIPT detection and SARS-CoV-2 detection for pregnant women by drawing only one tube of peripheral blood. In this way, SARS-CoV-2 screening can be performed for pregnant women in the progress of routine prenatal testing, which can find asymptomatic infections and supply optimal management and treatment.

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Cite the Article:

Linpeng S, Li X, Yang X, Zhou S, Bu X, Peng C, et al. A New Method of SARSCoV- 2 Screening for Pregnant Women Based on Non-Invasive Prenatal Test. Ann Clin Case Rep. 2022; 7: 2277.