Journavx helped most patients avoid opioids after surgery, a recent study found

Vertex’s Journavx (suzetrigine) allowed 76.1% of patients to recover from laparoscopic or arthroscopic surgery without a single rescue opioid, according to a study published Aug. 8, 2026, in Pain and Therapy.

Suzetrigine is the first non-opioid painkiller in its class, blocking a pain-signaling channel in peripheral nerves instead of acting on the brain the way opioids do. The FDA approved it in January 2025 for moderate to severe acute pain, based on two trials in patients recovering from abdominoplasty and bunionectomy surgery. Since then, Vertex has pushed to show the drug works across a wider range of common procedures, an important question for health plans and hospitals still weighing how much it can actually cut opioid use in everyday surgical care, and for a drug that costs roughly $15 a pill.

Laparoscopic abdominal and gynecologic surgery and arthroscopic orthopedic procedures, the focus of this study, are common outpatient operations where opioids are still routinely prescribed for several days afterward.

The study's lead author, Ashraf S. Habib, M.D., of the Department of Anesthesiology at Duke University School of Medicine, and his coauthors set out to extend suzetrigine's evidence base beyond the two surgery types used in its original approval trials, testing whether starting the drug before surgery and continuing it afterward, alongside standard non-opioid pain relievers, could reduce opioid use across a broader set of operations where extended opioid courses are typical.

Researchers enrolled 47 adults in this phase 4, single-arm, open-label trial, meaning every participant received suzetrigine and there was no placebo or comparison drug group. Patients were scheduled for laparoscopic abdominal or gynecologic surgery or arthroscopic orthopedic procedures such as knee or rotator cuff surgery of a type that typically requires opioids for 72 hours or longer afterward.

Patients took a 100-milligram dose of suzetrigine about an hour before surgery, along with acetaminophen and, for most patients, ibuprofen; those having rotator cuff surgery received a nerve block plus other non-opioid drugs instead. Suzetrigine was then continued twice daily for up to 14 days afterward, with oxycodone or hydromorphone available as rescue medication if needed. Because there was no comparison group, researchers analyzed results descriptively, reporting percentages with 95% confidence intervals rather than testing suzetrigine head-to-head against another treatment.

Overall, 90.9% of patients rated their pain control as good, very good or excellent (95% CI, 78.3%-97.5%), with nearly half, 47.7%, calling it excellent. And 76.1% made it through recovery without needing any rescue opioid, ranging from 60.0% of gynecologic-surgery patients to 87.5% of those recovering from rotator cuff repair. Among the 11 patients who did need a rescue opioid, the average use was small: about 2.2 tablets, or 16.7 morphine milligram equivalents, over 1.7 days. Most patients were recovering from knee surgery (38.3%), hernia repair (29.8%), rotator cuff surgery (17.0%) or gynecologic procedures (12.8%). Good pain control held up over time, reported by 83.3% of patients on day three and 93.2% by day seven. Side effects were mostly mild: 8.5% of patients had constipation and 6.4% had nausea, and no one vomited. One serious adverse event, an aspiration, was reported and judged unrelated to suzetrigine.

The authors argued their results compare favorably with prior data on similar surgeries, writing that in earlier research, “fewer than 50% of patients undergoing similar arthroscopic or laparoscopic procedures remained rescue opioid-free.”

The trial's main strength is that it extends suzetrigine's evidence beyond the two narrow surgery types used in its FDA approval into more common outpatient procedures. However, its limitations revealed here were no placebo or active comparison group, so the results can't be directly compared with other pain treatments; researchers didn't collect standardized pain-scale scores, relying instead on patients' overall rating of pain control; sample sizes within each surgery type were small, meaning the procedure-by-procedure breakdowns deserve caution; and most participants were white (85.1%), though the authors noted no racial difference in pain relief in suzetrigine's larger Phase 3 trials.

The authors concluded that suzetrigine, started before surgery and continued afterward as part of a multidrug pain-control regimen, “may help reduce reliance on opioids within current multimodal analgesia regimens across a broad range of clinical settings.”

Based on author beliefs, it’s intended that future testing and use of suzetrigine should be more broad across the kinds of surgery millions of patients undergo each year, rather than confining it to the narrower set of procedures studied in its original approval trials.