Tribune raises $40 million

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