Granted Patent B2

US 12,509,728 · App. 16/918,820 · Granted Dec 30, 2025

Inventors: Matthew Rabinowitz (San Francisco, CA); Milena Banjevic (Los Altos Hills, CA); Zachary Demko (San Francisco, CA); David Johnson (San Francisco, CA); Dusan Kijacic (Los Altos Hills, CA); Dimitri Petrov (Stanford, CA); Joshua Sweetkind-Singer (San Jose, CA); Jing Xu (Jersey City, NJ)

Assignee: Natera, Inc.

C12Q1/6883C12Q1/6827C12Q1/6855C12Q1/686C12Q1/6869C12Q1/6876G16B20/00G16B25/00G16B30/00G16B40/00C12Q2600/118C12Q2600/156C12Q2600/158

Abstract

Claims (19)

1 . A method preparing and characterizing a non-naturally occurring composition of amplified DNA derived from a maternal blood sample, said sample comprising fetal DNA and maternal DNA, the method comprising:

obtaining fetal and maternal chromosome DNA from cell-free DNA of the maternal blood sample;

ligating at least one adapter to at least some of the obtained chromosome DNA, or DNA derived therefrom, to generate adapter-ligated DNA, wherein the at least one adapter comprises a universal amplification sequence; and

performing amplification of the adapter-ligated DNA to generate a non-naturally occurring composition of amplified DNA derived from the fetal and maternal chromosome DNA, and characterizing the amounts of the amplified DNA in the composition, wherein the characterizing comprises quantitative allele measurements at polymorphic loci.

2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the characterized amounts for different alleles are combined.

3 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the amplification comprises clonal amplification of the amplified DNA to generate clonally amplified DNA from one or more chromosones of interest and one or more reference chromosomes before characterizing the amounts.

4 . The method of claim 3 , wherein the characterizing comprises measuring the amounts of the clonally amplified DNA derived from the one or more chromosomes of interest and the amount of the clonally amplified DNA from the one or more reference chromosomes.

5 . The method of claim 4 , wherein the reference chromosomes are derived from the maternal blood sample.

6 . The method of claim 3 , wherein the amounts of clonally amplified DNA are characterized using next-generation sequencing, or wherein the amounts of clonally amplified DNA are characterized using sequencing-by-synthesis.

7 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the characterized amounts of amplified DNA from each chromosome are combined into a single characterization.

8 . The method of claim 3 , wherein the method further comprises comparing the characterized amounts of DNA for the one or more chromosomes of interest from the maternal blood sample with characterized amounts of DNA for the one or more chromosomes of interest from maternal blood samples that are disomic for the one or more chromosomes of interest.

9 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the cell-free DNA is obtained from the maternal blood sample using an extraction technique that does not comprise monoclonal antibodies, fetal cell isolation, or a cell lysis inhibitor.

10 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the quantitative allele measurements at polymorphic loci are allele calls at a plurality of SNPs.

11 . The method of claim 10 , wherein at least 95% of the alleles at the plurality of SNPs are called.

12 . The method of claim 10 , wherein the confidence that an allele is correctly called at each SNP is at least 99%.

13 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the polymorphic loci comprise 1536 or more SNP loci.

14 . The method of claim 13 , wherein the polymorphic loci comprise between 1536 and 250,000 SNP loci.

15 . The method of claim 3 , wherein the chromosome DNA from the one or more chromosomes of interest and the one or more reference chromosomes are from the same chromosome.

16 . The method of claim 1 , wherein 0.3 ng or less of DNA is obtained from the maternal blood sample, and wherein at least 95% of the polymorphic loci are called with an accuracy of at least 99%.

Assignments (2)

Continuity (33)

References Cited (400)