Oslo-based Tribune Therapeutics has raised $40 million to advance its way of inhibiting the formation of scar tissue in disease. The cash from investors including LifeArc Ventures, Novo Holdings, and HealthCap will allow the biotechnology firm to start toxicology work on its pan-antifibrotic lead candidate and to advance other potential treatments.
The firm’s origins can be found at the University of Oslo, where Ole Jørgen Kaasbøll and Håvard Attramadal uncovered a new approach to treating fibrotic diseases through their work on a family of proteins that are involved in signaling fibrosis.
Most of these CCN proteins promote fibrosis, but one, CCN5, blocks the fibrotic effects of the other family members. Kaasbøll and Attramadal realized that while most CCN proteins are made up of four subdomains, and are snipped in half to initiate fibrosis, CCN5 has only three subdomains. The same snipping creates a smaller peptide that counteracts profibrotic signals from the rest of the family.
In 2019, Georg Vo Beiske, a venture partner at HealthCap, a Swedish venture capital firm, met Kaasbøll at a conference. He was impressed with the deep biological insight Kaasbøll had and what Vo Beiske calls his “brave” vision for turning that into therapeutics. The pair founded Tribune in 2020, with Vo Beiske as CEO and Kaasbøll as chief scientific officer, and the company officially launched in 2021.
Tribune’s lead candidate, TRX-44, mimics how CCN5 stops fibrosis signaling and is being developed first to treat the chronic lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The small team in Oslo hopes this molecule will also be able to target a broader range of fibrotic conditions.
Vo Beiske says Tribune has a pipeline of additional molecules and targets in the works, all based on the firm’s understanding of CCN proteins. “We want to lead the way in CCN biology,” he says.