Back

Hepatitis B cell-free DNA in non-invasive prenatal testing as an early biomarker of viral infectivity

Dao, V. N.; Nguyen, P. T.; Tran, T. N.; Nguyen, N. H.; Tang, H.-S.; Boni, M. F.; Giang, H.; Phan, D. M.

2026-08-17 genetic and genomic medicine
10.64898/2026.08.15.26360031 medRxiv
Show abstract

Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) was initially developed to detect chromosomal abnormalities in fetuses through the analysis of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal blood. Recent advancements have expanded NIPT's applications to include the detection of viral infections during pregnancy. However, interpreting pathogen-derived cell-free DNA (cf-DNA) remains clinically complex. This study explores the clinical relevance of hepatitis B virus (HBV) cf-DNA using a dataset of approximately 500,000 NIPT visits and an independent validation cohort of 582 pregnant women (40 HBV-infected), aligned with HBV epidemiology from both population and individual perspectives. Our analysis reveals that HBV cf-DNA is a strong biomarker of high viral infectivity rather than a general marker of infection, suggesting its potential to identify pregnant women at heightened risk of vertical transmission by the end of the first trimester. Additionally, HBV-positive women showed a small but consistent reduction in fetal fraction relative to HBV-negative women across gestational weeks 9 - 17, an association compatible with an early effect of HBV on the placental contribution to cell-free DNA, although the observational design and unmeasured maternal covariates preclude causal inference.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.