Life sciences spin-out Cartegnia attracts funding from its parent university Leuven.

Cartagenia, spun out of Leuven University’s bioinformatics department in 2008, has closed a €4.25m ($5.9m) funding round. Investors included existing shareholders Capricorn ICT Arkiv – a Leuven-based fund focussing on digital healthcare and big data – and Flemish investment company PMV, as well as Gemma Frisius Fund, the venture fund of Leuven University. A member of Cartagenia’s management team also invested. 

Both Gemma Frisius Fund and PMV are previous investors, as they contributed to the company’s previous funding round of €2.2m ($3m) in 2011. The company intends to use the new funding to expand its commercialisation efforts in key markets including Europe and North America. It is hoping to grow its customer base for both the Cartagenia Bench platform and extend its product portfolio in oncologogy and reproductive health.

Cartagenia supplies interpretation support software, database systems and related services to genetic labs and clinicians, enabling them to perform clinically relevant analysis of genetic findings quickly and efficiently. Its products allow researchers to quickly identify constitutional and rare diseases or perform pre-natal diagnosis and screening. The company currently counts more than 120 labs and clinics across North America, Europe and Australia amongst its clients.

The funding round comes at a great time for the company, as they have also announced an agreement with Agilent Technologies, which will distribute the Bench Lab product to small and medium-sized cytogenetic laboratories across the world. That distribution will happen through use-based licenses, and thus allow labs with limited budgets to gain access to Cartagenia’s product.

Herman Verrelst, CEO of Cartagenia, said: “We have achieved great success both supporting genetic labs worldwide adopting array or NGS technologies in clinical diagnostic applications and in partnering with our existing customers in developing interpretation pipelines in multiple clinical domains. With this funding round, we will expand this strategy further into key areas such as pre-natal testing, cancer screening, and diagnostic oncology genetic testing.”