With an FDA decision looming over its first foray into the acute pain space, Vertex Pharmaceuticals has commissioned a pair of surveys to take stock of that space.
The resulting report, “The State of Pain in America,” explores how both patients and healthcare providers perceive pain and its available treatments. One of the contributing surveys was conducted by Vertex itself, spanning 1,001 adults and 547 doctors in the U.S. who had recently been treated for or treated acute pain, respectively, while the other was conducted by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and included 49 of the academy’s members who had treated moderate-to-severe pain in the preceding month.
Of the pain patients surveyed, the vast majority, 89%, said the condition is a major disruption to their daily lives. They cited resulting limitations in their abilities to walk, exercise, sleep and engage in hobbies, as well as impacts to their work schedules and emotional well-being.
Many of the patients seemed to express dissatisfaction with current pain treatments: More than three-quarters of the group said they were interested in trying a different medication if their acute pain returns and just over 50% said they were specifically looking for a treatment with fewer side effects than their previous medication.
As for the types of treatments available, about half of the patients surveyed said they were concerned about the risk of developing an opioid addiction, and 67% said they would request a non-opioid medication the next time they need pain treatment.
Those concerns were echoed by the doctors surveyed. More than 70% of both groups of doctors expressed concern about the possibility of opioid addiction among their patients, and similar numbers cited the risk of side effects linked to currently available pain medications. Overall, more than half of those surveyed said they face challenges in treating their patients’ pain with current medication options.
Nearly 90% of doctors said their patients prefer to manage pain without opioids and both 74% of the AAOS surgeons surveyed and 83% of the larger group of healthcare providers agreed there’s a large unmet need for a new class of non-opioid pain treatments.
The survey results, of course, bode well for Vertex’s own pain treatment. Currently known as suzetrigine, the drug is currently under FDA review after Vertex announced at the end of July that the agency had accepted its new drug application, with a PDUFA date set for Jan. 30.
Suzetrigine is a NaV1.8 inhibitor, and Vertex has billed it as the first in a potential new class of non-opioid pain signal inhibitors for the approximately 80 million people in the U.S. each year who are prescribed medicine for acute pain. In results shared at the start of this year, the drug met its primary endpoints in a pair of phase 3 trials, significantly improving pain levels over placebo in both—though it failed to meet a secondary endpoint pitting it against the widely used opioid med Vicodin.
In the meantime, Vertex is also currently studying the use of suzetrigine to treat pain associated with diabetic peripheral neuropathy and lumbosacral radiculopathy.