And a supposedly non-addictive one.

Of course, many painkillers that ended up being addictive were originally touted as non-addictive, so I would be cautious. On the other hand, this drug works through a different mechanism:

The pill, known for now as VX-548, targets a particular sodium channel that is active only in the body’s peripheral sensory nerves, where it helps transmit pain signals to the brain. The idea is that inhibiting the channel might ease pain without serious systemic side effects — including the risk of addiction and abuse associated with opioids.

In an early trial, researchers found some promising evidence that the drug can take the edge off of post-surgery pain.

That would be great, but what would be even greater would be a new drug for chronic pain, in particular neuropathic pain. I have quite a bit of personal experience with neuropathic pain – unfortunately. I’ve written about it on this blog. One of those posts is this one from 2014, which also touts a possible new drug for pain, in that case neuropathic pain. I’m not sure whatever happened to that drug …

At any rate, this latest medication might also be used some day for neuropathic pain, its developers are saying:

A Vertex spokesperson said the company has started an early trial of VX-548 for neuropathic pain. That’s pain caused by nerve damage, such as diabetic neuropathy.

Waxman said the need for new neuropathic pain therapies is “great,” and peripheral sodium channels should be studied as targets for treatment. But any such therapy would be down the road.

The rest of this post is an excerpt from what I’d previously written about neuropathic pain:

We all know what pain from an injury feels like. But if you’re fortunate, you don’t know – and will never have to learn from personal experience – what neuropathic pain is like.

Nerves ordinarily conduct pain impulses when tissues are damaged, but that sort of pain corresponds to the degree of injury and is time-limited. Once healing occurs, the pain (or almost all of it) goes away. Neuropathic pain is different; it arises from injury to the nerves themselves. They become disordered in a host of ways, and the quality of the pain impulses is quite different from that of the more familiar types of pain, and has a marked tendency to become chronic…

Not that much is known about nerve pain today, and it remains exceedingly difficult to treat. But about twenty years ago, when I began to deal with it myself, it was the relative Dark Ages of pain control.

When I hurt my arms it was terrifying; the pain felt like nothing I’d ever had before, and it was with me 24/7. The best I can do to describe it is to say that among its many horrific qualities was the feeling of having sustained a severe sunburn on the entire surface of both arms. But with a real sunburn, there are salves and ointments to apply, you know why you’re hurting, and you know that in a few days the pain will go away.

This pain was different. It waxed and waned in odd and erratic fashion, although it tended to be at its worst at night, which made sleep nearly impossible and the nights a long drawn-out torment. It wasn’t just the burning, either. There was also tingling and stabbing pain and severe achiness and exquisite sensitivity and weakness and pressure and all sorts of odd sensations that gave me the feeling that my body had become a sadistic trickster bent on driving me mad …

What’s more, although most pain is a warning sign that something is being damaged (stove, hot, get away!), neuropathic pain appears to have no reasonable purpose at all. No tissue is being harmed, and yet the pain goes on and on and on. You can see why a successful treatment for neuropathic pain would be a boon to humankind.