Pain drug developer Latigo launches

After 4-plus years in stealth, a California biotechnology firm has launched to develop pain drugs that could one day replace opioids. The venture capital firm Westlake Village BioPartners, based just northwest of Los Angeles, is behind the start-up, Latigo Biotherapeutics. Two Amgen veterans spearheaded Latigo’s growth: Westlake co-founding managing director Sean Harper, who was at Amgen for 16 years and led R&D there , and Westlake operating partner Desmond Padhi, who headed the firm’s pharmacokinetics team and other therapeutic divisions for 19 years. Padhi is acting interim CEO of Latigo, which already has $135 million in series A funding and a drug candidate in Phase 1 clinical trials. Harper and Padhi set out in 2019 with the intention of building a pain company. They licensed some chemistry from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, but Harper says that the approach they settled on—blocking a sodium channel called Na v 1.8—ultimately