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The value created by applying Sera's PreTRM® test and treat strategy enables savings to be shared in an innovative value-based paradigm

SALT LAKE CITY, COPPELL, Texas and SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sera Prognostics Inc., The Pregnancy Company® (NASDAQ: SERA), focused on improving maternal and neonatal health by providing innovative pregnancy biomarker information to doctors and patients, Sonrava Health, a national family of health and wellness companies, and Cerebrae, an innovator in pricing and measuring the financial value of care, are collaborating to provide Sera's PreTRM® Test to members of Sonrava Health's employer-sponsored health insurance program. The PreTRM® Test is the only broadly clinically validated, commercially available blood test that provides an early, individual risk assessment for spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic, singleton pregnancies. Sera's PreTRM® Test identifies nearly 90% of pregnancies where spontaneous preterm deliveries will occur, enabling earlier proactive intervention designed to improve the well-being of mothers and babies.

Sonrava Health partners with Cerebrae to evaluate and design their value-based employee healthcare benefits offering. Cerebrae has developed a technology platform that leverages actuarial and data science to accurately forecast financial risk and monitor a healthcare solution's performance. The Cerebrae Platform provides actuarially rigorous risk management capabilities enabling participants it collaborates with, in the healthcare ecosystem, to confidently enter into a value-based arrangement. Using the Cerebrae Platform, Sonrava Health was able to forecast the financial return on investment (ROI) that inclusion of the PreTRM® Test is expected to provide its employees and their growing families.

"Employers who provide health benefits to their employees struggle to implement programs that address important healthcare challenges in a financially sustainable manner," said Gregory C. Critchfield, MD, MS, Chairman and CEO of Sera Prognostics. "The collaboration announced today is an important and exemplary model of achieving these critical objectives. Sonrava Health takes a value-based approach to its employer-sponsored health insurance plan and seeks to ensure accountability for the outcomes provided by its offered services. We are pleased to see that rigorous, third-party analysis by Cerebrae supports the inclusion of the PreTRM® Test into Sonrava Health's maternity benefits. Sonrava Health's value-based innovation approach is to provide PreTRM® testing to improve outcomes for pregnant women and their babies."

Data published in ClinicoEconomics and Outcomes Research  (https://www.dovepress.com/cost-effectiveness-of-a-proteomic-test-for-preterm-birth-prediction-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-CEOR) in September 2021 demonstrated that the PreTRM® strategy, consisting of testing and proactive, evidence-based interventions, showed both improved neonatal outcomes and reduced immediate and long-term treatment costs associated with premature birth when compared to routine care.

"Our oral healthcare and orthodontics practices are driven by evolving data and dental technologies, and we value data and innovation in all aspects of our organization," said Kevin Simes, Director, Total Rewards at Western Dental & Orthodontics, a member of the Sonrava Health family of wellness companies. "The data and rigorous analytics that Cerebrae provides enable us to provide new health insurance services and benefits to our employees with high confidence that we will see an excellent ROI. We are proud to add the PreTRM® Test to our comprehensive maternity benefits package and remain committed to helping our employees achieve optimum health outcomes for themselves and their families."

"Cerebrae was established to transform next-generation actuarial science into actionable intelligence that providers, employers, and payers can use to project financial risk and monitor performance of healthcare services and strategies," said Frank Cheung, FSA, MAAA, Chief Executive Officer of Cerebrae. "Sonrava Health's approach to designing and evolving its employer-sponsored health insurance plan is grounded in a commitment to identifying and incorporating value-based strategies to improve employee health while reducing costs. Our analysis forecasts cost savings given the projected clinical impact of the PreTRM® Test, and through Cerebrae as an independent, trusted intermediary, Sonrava Health was able to determine Sera Prognostics as a provider that can drive the most clinical value for its employees and financial value for its company."

The PreTRM® Test was developed and validated for prediction of spontaneous preterm birth (sPTB) broadly in the U.S. in the Proteomic Assessment of Preterm Risk (PAPR) study. In a subsequent large prospective U.S. study, the Multicenter Assessment of a Spontaneous Preterm Birth Risk Predictor (TREETOP), the biomarkers were demonstrated to be predictive of very early preterm birth of any cause, length of neonatal hospital stay, and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Additional new data published in May 2022 showed improved PreTRM® Test predictive performance for women whose due dates are more reliably determined by ultrasound.

About Sonrava Health

Sonrava Health, through its affiliates, including Brident Dental & Orthodontics, DentalWorks, Mid-Atlantic Dental Partners, Perfect Teeth, Vital Smiles, and Western Dental & Orthodontics, is one of the nation's largest dental support organizations and a leader in accessible, affordable high quality oral healthcare, supporting care for approximately 3 million patient visits annually in 572 affiliated offices in 20 states coast to coast from California to Maryland and border to border from Michigan to Texas. In addition to general dentistry, Western Dental practices offer pediatric dentistry, orthodontics, including clear aligners, oral surgery, periodontics and endodontics, creating a convenient full service "Dental Home" with high quality dental implants and overdentures. Western Dental is also the family home of ClearArc Orthodontic Aligners, the GUMX Defender Plus+ perio treatment system, LooksBrite Eye Centers, EyeMax Vision Plan, and MIB Benefit Plans. For more information, please visit www.Sonrava.com.

About Cerebrae

At Cerebrae, we are on a mission to remove the friction points around value-based contracts in an evolving healthcare landscape. For providers, employers, and payers, Cerebrae's platform translates powerful actuarial methodologies to a user-friendly tool that accurately predicts a clinical solution's impact on total cost of care, configures value-based agreements, and measures cost of care outcomes. This enables contracting parties to price value-based care with trust and confidence.

About Sera Prognostics, Inc.

Sera Prognostics is a leading health diagnostics company dedicated to improving the lives of women and babies through precision pregnancy care. Sera's mission is to deliver early, pivotal information in pregnancy to physicians, enabling them to improve the health of their patients, resulting in reductions in the costs of healthcare delivery. Sera has a robust pipeline of innovative diagnostic tests focused on the early prediction of preterm birth risk and other complications of pregnancy. Sera's precision medicine PreTRM® Test reports to a physician the individualized risk of spontaneous premature delivery in a pregnancy, enabling earlier proactive interventions in women with higher risk. Sera Prognostics is located in Salt Lake City, Utah.

About Preterm Birth

Preterm birth is defined as any birth before 37 weeks' gestation and is the leading cause of illness and death in newborns. The 2021 March of Dimes Report Card shows that more than one in ten infants is born prematurely. Prematurity is associated with a significantly increased risk of major long-term medical complications, including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, chronic respiratory illness, intellectual disability, seizures, and vision and hearing loss, and can generate significant costs throughout the lives of affected children. The annual health care costs to manage short- and long-term complications of prematurity in the United States were estimated to be approximately $25 billion for 2016.

About the PreTRM® Test

The PreTRM® Test is the only broadly validated, commercially available blood-based biomarker test that provides an early, accurate and individualized risk prediction for spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic singleton pregnancies. The PreTRM® Test measures and analyzes proteins in the blood that are highly predictive of preterm birth. The PreTRM® Test enables physicians to identify, during the 18th or 20th week of pregnancy, which women are at increased risk for preterm birth, driving more informed, personalized clinical decisions based on each woman's individual risk. The PreTRM® Test is ordered by a medical professional.

Sera Prognostics, the Sera Prognostics logo, The Pregnancy Company, and PreTRM are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sera Prognostics, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to women not found to be at higher risk of preterm delivery by the PreTRM® Test having extremely high confidence of not delivering a premature infant; and the company's strategic directives under the caption "About Sera Prognostics, Inc." These "forward-looking statements" are based on management's current expectations of future events and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those set forth in or implied by forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: net losses, cash generation, and the potential need to raise more capital; revenues from the PreTRM Test representing substantially all Company revenues to date; the need for broad scientific and market acceptance of the PreTRM Test; a concentrated number of material customers; our ability to introduce new products; potential competition; our proprietary biobank; critical suppliers; the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on our operations, as well as the business or operations of third parties with whom we conduct business; estimates of total addressable market opportunity and forecasts of market growth; potential third-party payer coverage and reimbursement; new reimbursement methodologies applicable to the PreTRM Test, including new CPT codes and payment rates for those codes; changes in FDA regulation of laboratory- developed tests; the intellectual property rights protecting our tests and market position; and other factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" contained in our Final Prospectus on Form S-1, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 14, 2021, as well as any updates to those risk factors filed from time to time in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10- Q, Annual Reports on Form 10-K, or Current Reports on Form 8-K. All information in this press release is as of the date of the release, and the Company undertakes no duty to update this information unless required by law.

Contact 

Investor Contact
Peter DeNardo, CapComm Partners
peter@capcommpartners.com 
+1 (415) 389-6400

Media Contact
Erich Sandoval, FINN Partners
Erich.sandoval@finnpartners.com
+1 (917) 497-2867

SOURCE Sera Prognostics, Inc.