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Carmenta Bio Secures $2M in Seed Funding

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Maternal and fetal health firm Carmenta Bioscience today said that it has raised more than $2 million in seed funding.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm plans to use proceeds from the financing to continue development of its test for diagnosing preeclampsia in pregnant women and to commercialize the test.

The test is based on technology developed by Atul Butte and Bruce Ling, professors at Stanford University and co-founders of Carmenta. The company has licensed the technology exclusively from Stanford.

Butte and Ling discovered a combination of clinically relevant, proprietary protein biomarkers in serum that demonstrated the ability to identify pregnant women with preeclampsia, and an initial trial funded by the March of Dimes and the SPARK program at Stanford demonstrated "extremely" high sensitivity and specificity, Carmenta said.

As a result of the financing, Camille Samuels is joining Carmenta's board, the company said. Samuels is an affiliated director with Versant Ventures and has served as a board observer for Fluidigm and Genomic Health, and as a board member for ParAllele BioScience.

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