Natera

You're known for this.

Now we have all this MRD testing available, you know, what Natera is doing and Personalis and all these companies.

They sell a lot of tests.

Do you feel like this is scaling up?

There's the next

assay that we're all very curious about, of course, was an assay that was first developed by Ash Lizard and colleagues at Stanford called Phased-Seq, recently acquired by Natera and being incorporated into the Signatera platform.

That's being prospectively evaluated in some very powerful trials, including the trial called Alpha-3, which takes patients who are getting first-line therapy, whatever they're getting, they get their CR, God willing, and once they're in a CR, they're then tested with phased-seq.

And if they're phased-seq positive, they're randomized to close observation or preemptive allogeneic CAR T-cell therapy with an allocar called SEMA cell.

But again, just to clarify, so this assay, either Clonuseq or the new one that you were talking about with the trial, are they tumor-informed specifically or not?

The answer is yes.

And, you know, PhaseSeq, the Natera one, is definitely tumor-informed.

It's looking for phased variants.

And I'm certainly, as lymphoma doctors, we're a little late in the game for using the ClonoSeq, but I think mantle cells for sure, where are those types? Is that the one you use or do you have an in-house one at Sarah Cannon?

We use the commercial assays, so both ClonoSeq as well as the Natera assay.

And so they have slight differences, but both are commercially available.

So it's great to have because anybody can order those.

Well, even there, it's been tough.

Let's be honest, because Hinge Health, and again, if you got in on this, like Leaderboard did, I mean, Leaderboard has a 100% gain on this, but they also had Natera, N-T-R-A.

I had this last week, and I ditched it because, you know, it was just, I wasn't feeling great about things on Friday.

It was a recent ad, so I didn't have a lot of cushion, and this just kind of really, you know, fell out of bed, along with a lot of our medical research names, like Grail, G-R-A-L, GH, kind of in this medical services area too.

Lilly, I do have a position in Lilly.

This is one of the few stocks I'm still holding because... it's not doing anything wrong.

Uh, so yeah, you can certainly hold some of these things that aren't doing anything wrong, but you have to look at your, your stocks like a Natera, uh, just because it's in medical doesn't mean it's safe.

We're seeing a lot of, uh, rugs getting pulled out from under you on a lot of different stocks.

That's where we're going here.

Now, for all of the advances like Natera's fetal focus, that after a positive maternal carrier screen for something like SMA, you can then reflex to the child to assess risk status.

And I'll be very clear, remember, these are just risk status results.

These are not diagnostic tests, okay? They're still false negatives and false positives, but they are very good.

And they do not replace formal amnio.

But for a lot of patients who either can't afford or are afraid of an invasive test, the reflex test like Natera's fetal focus or even Unity's reflex fetal screen can check for these things.

The latest kind of innovation in this scientific progression is Unity's confirmed test.

And we've talked about that in a previous episode where we actually had the medical director from that corporation, again, not a sponsor, talk about that scientific development where that actually looks at intact fetal cells from the placental source to look for trisomy 13, 18, and 21 after a first cell-free DNA screen.