NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Biospecimen firm Sanguine BioSciences announced on Thursday the closing of its seed funding round.
The round was led by Invent Ventures and Heliant Ventures and will be used to further build Sanguine's infrastructure, it said. Sanguine did not disclose the amount of the funding.
Based in Valencia, Calif., the company serves essentially as a conduit between researchers who require high-quality biospecimens and research subjects who can supply them. It "engages" subjects by using social media and then schedules blood draws, which are then processed into DNA, RNA, cells, plasma, and serum to be used by pharmaceutical firms and research organizations in their work.
Sanguine said it has created an infrastructure that informs research subjects about how their biosamples are used "in order to ultimately increase trust and information flow back to researchers."
The seed funding will go toward further development of Sanguine's internal infrastructure to "safely and efficiently collect, process, document, and store up to 1,000 blood samples each moth across the West Coast," Co-Founder and CEO Brian Neman said in a statement.
He added that revenues and the number of research subjects have seen "significant growth" since the end of last year, and "[t]he successful completion of the laboratory and regulatory infrastructure allowed us the opportunity to open our doors to research participants, both healthy, and diagnosed with an ailment(s), and to researchers at numerous pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions."