With almost 17 million live births in 2014, China is already one of the largest potential markets for prenatal diagnostics, including noninvasive testing of fetal DNA in the mother's blood to detect fetal chromosomal defects. With the announcement by the Communist Party of China in late October to replace the country's longstanding one-child policy with a two-child policy, the Chinese NIPT market is poised to grow even further over the next few years, and several test providers stand to gain from the expansion.

Only about 5 to 6 percent of women in China, mostly in urban areas, currently obtain NIPT, according to industry experts, but their number is predicted to increase quickly in coming years. "We expect the field to grow dramatically, with a lot of new players entering the market," Jing jing Zhao, marketing director for Berry Genomics, told GenomeWeb.

BGI and Berry Genomics currently dominate the Chinese NIPT market. BGI expects to provide around 400,000 of its NIFTY tests in 2015, and Berry close to 300,000 of its Bambni tests.

A growing number of smaller providers exist, such as Annoroad, Yikon Genomics, and Xcelom, and new players are mulling entering the market, among them Roche's Ariosa Diagnostics. "Yes, we are interested, and our Roche China affiliate is leading this effort," Dave Mullarkey, Ariosa's chief operating officer, told GenomeWeb. Ariosa's Harmony test is not available in China yet, he added, because it has not been approved by the Chinese Food and Drug Administration. Unlike most other NIPTs, it runs on a microarray platform instead of a sequencing instrument.

BGI currently conducts NIFTY at four central laboratories in Shenzhen, Wuhan, Tianjing, and Hong Kong, according to Bicheng Yang, director of communication and public engagement at BGI, but it is also establishing joint next-gen sequencing laboratories with collaborators "to promote better access to NIPT."

BGI's Yang, on the other hand, said experts are predicting 5.7 million additional births in 2016, and 5.8 million in 2017, followed by a gradual decrease after that. As a result of the new births, "we expect an increase of hundreds of thousands of tests," Yang said.