Latigo debuts with $135M and best-in-class aspirations for pain programme

14 Feb 2024
firstwordpharma.com
Phase 2Phase 1
Latigo Biotherapeutics was working on a non-opioid solution for pain before it was cool.
The company emerged from stealth Wednesday with a $135-million series A and a clinical pain candidate inhibiting NaV1.8, the same target as Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ headline-grabbing pain programme. Latigo was incubated in 2019 by Westlake Village Biopartners, who led the round along with 5AM Ventures and Foresite Capital, with participation from Corner Ventures.
Sean Harper, founding managing director of Westlake, told FirstWord that when the team set out to create a pain company, research in the space had “really fallen out of fashion,” so much so that when the they searched for compounds to in-license, they instead found a “dearth of any real interesting innovation.”
“Now with Vertex, it's kind of in vogue and everybody thinks pain is a great opportunity, but it really wasn't like that when we started the company,” Harper added.
The company got off to such a poor start, he said, they had a hard time even finding people who would want to work in a de novo drug discovery lab for pain – until Amgen halted its neuroscience operations in late 2019, laying off 149 people. The pharma’s loss was Latigo’s serendipitous gain.
Harper, who had just spent 16 years as head of R&D at Amgen, got to work immediately.
“I knew all the people that were in the pain unit and how great they were, and as soon as they were let go, we selectively picked up a lot of those people and built the laboratory operations, built the company here in Thousand Oaks,” he said.
Pain pipeline construction
Latigo was officially founded in 2020 and launched the series A that year. Over the past four years, the company has used the proceeds to develop its pipeline and build its 26-person team, mostly in research.
Latigo’s lead candidate is LTG-001, an oral compound intended to treat acute and chronic pain that’s in a Phase I trial in healthy volunteers. Pending an OK from the FDA, the company plans to start a Phase II study this year.
“The idea of coming out now is certainly linked to the progress that's been made, this important catalyst of having a potentially best-in-class NaV1.8 inhibitorNaV1.8 inhibitor in the clinic, and the success of others in this space, namely Vertex, that gives us a lot of encouragement about the path that we're on,” Nancy Stagliano, who serves as chair of the board, told FirstWord.
In addition to LTG-001, Latigo has a second Nav1.8 inhibitorNav1.8 inhibitor in preclinical development, as well as undisclosed molecules in the discovery phase that are directed against genetically defined targets. The company also plans to add to its pipeline through a collaboration with an East Coast-based academic centre focused on identifying proprietary genetically linked targets.
That best-in-class confidence in LTG-001 comes from the collective preclinical evidence and the emerging clinical dataset, interim CEO Desmond Padhi told FirstWord.
First, LTG-001 has thus far shown a favourable safety profile, which affords Latigo the opportunity to test a wide variety of doses in clinical trials, Padhi said. Plus, the compound doesn’t cross the blood-brain-barrier, avoiding neurological toxicities that are often associated with central nervous system-acting drugs and instead ensures higher concentrations where it’s needed – the peripheral nervous system, where NaV1.8 is preferentially expressed.
And the candidate is highly selective for NaV1.8, which is a challenge in and of itself, Harper said. The target is extremely difficult to develop chemical compounds against because it differs in only a few amino acids from fellow sodium channel NaV1.7. Tissue selectivity is also important, as NaV1.8 is expressed in heart cells.
All told, the data suggest LTG-001 could be a best-in-class NaV1.8 inhibitorNaV1.8 inhibitor, Padhi said, adding that the next step is to prove its potential in the clinic.
Plenty of room in pain innovation
Despite the splash Vertex has made with its non-opioid Phase III data, which it reported in January, pain is “actually remarkably not crowded and competitive,” Harper said. That’s because of the difficulty of preclinical work, a preconceived notion that it will be impossible to have a new blockbuster pain pill, and of course, the opioid epidemic.
First, animal models aren’t very predictive or useful for pain drugs, which limits academic research in pain mechanisms. “No one’s made any innovation for the last 30 years,” Harper said.
Pharmaceutical companies have also been disincentivised from pain drug development because it’s become a highly genericised market, and they question the possibility of making money with a branded product. Plus, Harper said that drugmakers in the space got a lot of bad press from the fallout of the opioid crisis, “and they want really absolutely nothing to do anymore with the pain space.”
He estimated that non-opioid pain medications have double-digit billion-dollar global peak sales, with room for more than one drug. “You don't often see the first-in-class drug end up being the best-in-class drug,” he added.
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