While at Stanford she performed her doctoral research with Leonard Herzenberg, studying the use of flow cytometry to develop a noninvasive cytogenetic prenatal diagnostic test for Down syndrome.

[2] Bianchi joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1986, concurrently assuming a position as an attending neonatologist and geneticist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

[4] Bianchi is one of four authors of the book Fetology: Diagnosis and Management of the Fetal Patient,[5] which won the Association of American Publishers award for the best textbook in clinical medicine in 2000.

While the work proved challenging due to the relative rarity of the fetal cells in the mother’s blood, the research led to an unexpected finding.

The sequencing technology employed in cfDNA testing has a number of potential uses in many areas of health care, Dr. Messerlian says, including cancer, transplantation and in vitro fertilization protocols, and research she is conducting is exploring those possibilities.

[11] In 2014, Bianchi was the lead author on a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that examined cell-free fetal DNA test performance in a general obstetrical population.

[19] In 2022, Bianchi was a finalist for a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, or Sammie, in recognition of her efforts in advancing critical research to understand the medical implications of COVID-19 among underserved populations.