By 1992 Grotendorst, who had done work at the University of South Florida and is now at the University of Miami, concluded that it was CTGF, not TGF-beta, that triggers collagen production by binding to specific cell receptors.
Fibrogen's other approach, a joint effort with Japan's Sankyo , is to screen thousands of small-moleculeproteins on their shelves and those of other firms to see whether one or two will block CTGF from binding with receptors or knock out one of the collagen-producing signals that CTGF sends into a cell nucleus.