For the last quarter century, one of the world’s most capable drug developers toiled to make a new, non-addictive kind of painkiller. The journey was fittingly excruciating.
Pain, as Vertex Pharmaceuticals found out, is wildly complex. It starts simple enough, with a sliced hand or burned finger or broken bone. But it convolutes fast. Special nerve cells, activated by potentially dozens of chemicals and proteins, sense the pain and launch a signal up the spine like a firework, lighting up a patchwork of brain regions that interprets this message and decides how the body will feel.
Much about how this process unfolds in any given person remains hazy. Scientists suspect genetics, past experiences and the environment each play some role, perhaps explaining why two people who suffer the same injuries can have such dissimilar pain. This intricate web tripped up many of the world’s most adept pharmaceutical firms, a key…