Sanjay Gupta

And this is Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which many of your listeners may know this company.

But basically for a quarter century, they just were working on this drug, which was essentially trying to replicate what that gene did for that family in Karachi, Pakistan, to sort of take away pain without dulling everything, without making someone insensate or numb.

And it worked.

It was tested in a couple of different pain scenarios, and it just got approved this spring.

And by the way, Doc,

There had been no new pain medications approved since 1998.

Yeah.

Celebrex was the last one.

We approve on average about 40 to 50 new drugs a year, but not a single one for pain.

Yeah.

Which, you know, this is the chronic pain is the fastest growing condition in America, faster than cancer, diabetes, and dementia.

And yet there were no new medical options until Jurnavax came along.

So it's a fascinating backstory and a very, very needed option for patients as well.

I think the clip you may have seen was Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn.

And they basically were the first hospital to create what they originally referred to as an opioid-free shift, but a better terminology would be opioid-optimized.

And to be clear, look...

Opioids can have a real value, but at the same time, we've clearly overused them.

And that was sort of the thinking on, can we think of opioids as a last resort instead of a first resort for any pain malady that comes through the ER?

Kidney stones, broken hip, whatever it may be.

And there was no necessarily new modalities that they were using, but they started to do things that people have known about for some time, like nerve blocks, for example, which typically are done by anesthesiologists in preparation for surgery or something like that, but not really used in the emergency room.