Why We Invested in Tribune Therapeutics

He looked frail, so very frail. He was around 70 and had been admitted to the acute ward the previous evening. When he set his magazine down to talk, his face was calm, but his breathing was laboured, as if he’d just finished running. He hadn’t, he had just been laying in his bed all night. Our brains are wired to notice hyperventilation. I did. He didn’t. He had grown used to it.

Patients with respiratory failure are very common at emergency departments, and there are standard treatments for usual causes like COPD exacerbations, congestive heart failure and pneumonia. However, this man suffered from something else: idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, IPF, a severe disease where chronic inflammation and fibrosis scars your lungs until you can’t breathe, and you die. 

I remember being caught off-guard when I encountered that patient and was told that we had no meaningful treatments to give. For most of medical history, an IPF diagnosis meant just 2–5 years to live. That changed in 2014, when two drugs were approved, offering patients more time – sometimes even twice as long as they otherwise would have had. But the need for better treatments remains vast.

The patient I met was already on one of those drugs. He had been diagnosed 4–5 years earlier. I don’t know what happened to him. But I remember we had little left to offer.

Developing new treatments for IPF is daunting. In the past decade, over 8,500 patients have been enrolled in late-stage trials. Nearly all have failed. But that’s how medical progress works – trial, error, and then, sometimes, a breakthrough. And when breakthroughs happen, they’re often serendipitous, but in hindsight you can often identify fortuitous scientific insight, meticulous research and exceptional entrepreneurs. 

This why we invested in Tribune Therapeutics. Tribune Therapeutics has approached fibrosis in a novel way, using new insights into one of the body’s natural mechanisms (signalling through the CCN protein family). Their science is robust, their data compelling, and their team exceptional. And their approach doesn’t just work in lung fibrosis; it shows promise in other fibrotic diseases as well.

Most biotech companies don’t succeed. That is the price of progress. But we believe Tribune’s founders, science, and strategy have the potential to transform fibrotic disease treatment.

Since 1979, Industrifonden has partnered with researchers and entrepreneurs to turn ideas into life-changing medical advances. Now, we are proud to join Tribune in their mission to redefine anti-fibrotic treatment – and offer hope to patients who, today, still have too few options.

/Jonathan Ilicki and the Life Science team