A new pain-focused biotech is emerging this Valentine's Day—not to cure heartache, but pretty close. Latigo broke stealth cover today with $135 million to chase Vertex, the front runner in the effort to develop a new non-opioid pain option.
Latigo Biotherapeutics unveiled Wednesday with a lead nav1.8 inhibitor, LTG-001, currently being tested in healthy volunteers. If that target sounds familiar, it’s because Vertex is going after it as well with its own non-opioid treatment. VX-548 just beat placebo in a phase 3 trial in patients with acute pain but did not manage to best the standard of care, Vicodin. Vertex plans to file for FDA approval anyway this year and is seeking a broad label in moderate to severe acute pain.
Sean Harper, M.D., co-founding managing director of Westlake Village BioPartners, which founded and incubated Latigo beginning in 2020, said beating opioids is a "tough bar."
"I think a goal in an acute pain setting to beat that type of comparator handsomely … would have to be [an] aspiration," he said in an interview. With that said, Harper believes Latigo's molecule will differentiate from Vertex’s by mitigating off-target effects in the brain and by tackling chronic pain.
“We have every reason to believe that our nav1.8 inhibitor will be effective in both acute and chronic pain,” Harper said in an interview. “But obviously, that remains to be proven.”
The asset is in a healthy volunteers study now, and executives hope to initiate a phase 2 study for patients with acute pain later this year.
Harper said some of the foundational science behind LTG-001 originated from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development in Baltimore but that preclinical work was done at labs in Thousand Oaks, California. The VC firm plucked homegrown talent for help, hiring many Amgen employees who left as part of the pharma’s neuroscience divestment in late 2019. The next molecule behind LTG-001 was developed completely in-house, Harper said, in addition to other discovery work.
Desmond Padhi, an operating partner at Westlake, will be the interim CEO while Neuron23 CEO Nancy Stagliano, Ph.D., has been called upon to chair the board. Although corralling investor interest is never easy, Stagliano acknowledged that Latigo has “hit this important catalyst at just the right time.”
“Once in a while, you get the timing to be perfect,” she said.
The inaugural financing was co-led by 5AM Ventures and Foresite Capital with participation from Corner Ventures. Padhi wouldn’t lay out how much of a runway the $135 million affords but expects it would allow the company to complete the ongoing phase 1 trial and a future phase 2 acute pain study while planning for the chronic pain study. He also said Latigo was planning to initiate a clinical trial for the second molecule in the “near future.”