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By Crystal Lindell
Here’s some news that many pain patients could have predicted: A new non-opioid medication recently approved for acute, short-term pain is already being prescribed off-label for chronic pain. In fact, it’s prescribed more often for chronic pain than opioids!
Suzetrigine, which goes by the brand name Journavx, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in January 2025. Unlike opioids, Journavx blocks pain signals in the peripheral nervous system, not in the brain, so it doesn’t have the same “liking” effects of opioids, which can lead to dependence or addiction.
Developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Journavx was the first new medication for acute pain in over two decades, and is primarily intended for post-operative pain or emergency trauma care.
But 15 months later, new data published in Epic Research shows that Journavx is often being prescribed for chronic, long-term pain instead.
The researchers studied health records for more than 3.6 million U.S. adults who received a new prescription for either Journavx or an opioid between February 2025 and April 2026.
They found that chronic pain accounted for 33% of the Journavx prescriptions. By comparison, opioids were prescribed just 6.7% of the time for chronic pain.
Opioid prescribing was concentrated in patients who had surgery (48.8%) or acute pain (19.8%), which together accounted for over two-thirds of the opioid prescriptions.
Only 10.2% of the Journavx prescriptions were for surgery and 31.8% were for acute pain.
“Suzetrigine adoption has been concentrated in specialties that manage chronic and surgical pain longitudinally rather than in the acute-care settings where opioids are most commonly initiated,” the study found.
The Epic researchers found that patients prescribed Journavx were often older and more likely to be female than patients prescribed opioids. Specifically, 43% of Journavx patients were 65 or older, compared with 31.4% of opioid recipients.
Off-label prescribing of a medication is perfectly legal and, in some cases, appropriate. But drugs are rarely put through clinical trials for those off-label purposes.
Results from clinical trials suggest that Journavx is a mild pain reliever, at best, for acute or chronic pain.
In Phase 3 clinical studies of acute pain after minimally invasive surgeries, Journavx was no more effective than a low-dose combination of hydrocodone and acetaminophen, more commonly known as Vicodin.
In a Phase 2 study, Journavx was essentially no better than a placebo in relieving chronic back and hip pain caused by lumbosacral radiculopathy.
Journavx is priced by Vertex Pharmaceuticals at a wholesale cost of $15.50 for a 50mg pill. When taken twice a day for acute pain, that works out to $420 for a one-week supply. By comparison, a supply of 100 Vicodin tablets costs about $142.
Journavx is currently only available in an oral formulation, which severely limits its use for post-surgical pain, where injectable or intravenous analgesics are often preferred.
