October 5, 2025 • 13 mins
Damian Sanchez, (Damian J to music fans) is a Miami-based jazz musician. A car accident landed him in the hospital with multiple fractures to his leg. Once there, he faced the difficult decision of whether or not to take the pain medication that was offered to him. With patients like Damian in mind, Dr. Paul Negulescu and the research team at Vertex are thinking differently about pain – they’re investigating potential non-opioid based treatment options that aim to target pain differently.
Produced by Bloomberg Media Studios and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Featured guests:
Damian Sanchez is a Miami based jazz musician. He is the founder of the Damian J Foundation.
Norm Buckley is the Scientific Director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Pain Research and Care at McMaster University.
David Altshuler is the Executive Vice President, Global Research and Chief Scientific Officer at Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Paul Negulescu is a renowned cystic fibrosis researcher and now the Senior Vice President leading the team researching pain at Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Read more about Vertex's approach to targeting pain at VRTX.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Since you're a subscriber to this Bloomberg podcast, we thought
you'd be interested in a sponsored podcast called Targeting the
Toughest Diseases, produced by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Bloomberg Media Studios.
It explores the innovative tools, methods, and unique philosophy Vertex
Pharmaceuticals is using to search for treatments for some of
(00:21):
humanity's most challenging diseases. Here's a recent episode.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
That's Damian Sanchez or if you are a jazz fan
living in Miami, Damian j Well.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I play all types of music, but yes, my passion
lies in the jazz genre. The history of jazz inspires
me to create. I get very passionate about talking about
the history of jazz from its very beginnings until today.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
His passion started when he was twelve years old.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I saw a picture in a magazine that changed my life.
When I was young. It was a picture of a
young man who was holding every single woodwind could play
them all, and so I wanted to be like that kid.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Damien started with the obo, then the flute, the alto, sacks,
the clarinet, and even the bassoon.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
I also play guitar. I also play piano, and I
also play various percussion instruments, mainly Latin percussion stuff because
it's part of my project to perform Latin jazz.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
But on a day that should have been a musical celebration,
Damien's life took a terrible turn.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I'm Jordan Gospore, a member of the University of Southern
California Center for Health Journalism. This is Targeting the Toughest
Diseases a podcast produced by Bloomberg Media Studios and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
In this series, we look at some of humanity's most
challenging diseases and how Vertex, a Boston based biotech company,
(01:52):
is using innovative tools, methods, and a unique philosophy to
search for treatments and cheers. Today we're looking at a
cute pain. You might think pain is just a sign
that something else is wrong in your body, but Vertex
is looking at pain as its own unique condition. They're
(02:15):
researching it as a disease.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
It's December twenty twenty two. I just finished about a
month of rehearsals with a symphony, A very specific symphony
made up of nonprofit organizations sponsoring young musicians and professional
musicians here that play classical music that is of unheard
of composers of color.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
This was the day of the inaugural performance.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I wake up early that day. It was a Saturday.
We're performing at the Broward Set of the Performing Arts,
this wonderful hall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I live in Miami,
so I grab my scooter.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
See, Damien doesn't like driving. He's not a guy that
likes sitting still, and South Florida's traffic can be bad,
so instead of a car, he uses an electric kickscooter
and public transit. Getting to Fort Lauderdale means riding his
scooter to the train station, taking the train up the coast,
and then using the scooter again to get to the venue.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I have my English hornant and my obow and my
music and my backpack on my backstrapped on. I had
my helmet.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
He's also wearing a brand new tuxedo.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
And I remember looking to the left and looking to
the right and saying, ha ha ah, traffic sucks.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Damien was in the bike lane going down a steep
hill when a driver apparently attempting to get out of
the gridlock, suddenly turned into the bike lane.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I hit the front of her car with my scooter,
which I do not let go of, which actually ends
up flipping over the front of her car. I fly
into the air and I land on my ribs, which
get cracked, and my foot, my right foot get caught
up in the accident, and my tibia and my fibuya
both are shattered in many many places, and my leg
(04:16):
is completely discombobulated, disjointed to the side.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Damien didn't lose consciousness. In fact, he tried to stand up.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
And as soon as I put one ounce of pressure
on that right foot, then the pain started coming in,
very very strong. As you can imagine, I have all
these broken bones in my right leg, and I'm trying
to walk on it and walk it off like nothing
ever happened.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
A crowd gathered and someone called for an ambulance. Within minutes,
he was in the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
The pain in his leg was unbearable.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
This one guy says, we're gonna give you morphine and
we're gonna manipulate that leg until they're ready to operate,
because it needs to be manipulated. I said, I've never
had any drugs. I don't take drugs. They said, well,
you're gonna want it. I said okay, and they gave
it to me through my ivy and I felt like
I was really drunk. And then he grabbed my foot
and put it back in place. I ready didn't feel inebriated.
(05:24):
I was laughing. I was joking, you know. I was
being very bubbly, which I usually am anyways, but I
was kind of scared.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
After a few hours, the drugs were off and the
pain returned. It was time for a second dose.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
I wasn't gonna take anything. I didn't want to get hooked.
My family has a lineage of substance and alcohol abuse.
My brother fights it, and my uncles fought it, and
I've always had that trauma in my brain.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
It's a horrible decision many patients face, choosing between pain
and the risk of addiction. The doctors tried their best
to persuade him.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
They were all about it. They were all about it.
Now you sure, are you sure? You don't want to
think nothing? What are you going to do? I'm just
gonna deal with it.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
And that's what many patients do when faced with acute pain.
They just deal with it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
I never took any pain medication no matter how bad
it hurt. But yeah, the first three months were hell Man.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Pain isn't entirely a bad thing. It's actually an important
warning system. It's our body's way of telling us something
is wrong.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Typically, you expect a broken limb to hurt a lot
when you injure it gradually get better. It'll be a
key for a few weeks, but as it heals after
three months, you would not expect someone to still have
pain from that broken limb.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Doctor Norman Buckley is the director of the Michael G.
Degrout National Pain Center in Hamilton, Canada.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
There certainly are settings where people continue to report pain.
Then you have to consider what's the reason for that,
he says.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Doctors have used medicine to manage pain for centuries. Opium
in the sixteen hundreds, ether and chloroform in the eighteen hundreds,
then morphine and even heroin in the nineteen hundreds. More recently,
insets have been used. Those are nonsterodal anti inflammatory drugs,
and of course opioids, which can be effective but bring
(07:29):
tolerability concerns and carry the risk of addiction. Innovation and
pain management has been slow, in part because pain is
both common and complex. It affects individual people differently. Those
differences might be influenced by gender, genetics, and age, as
well as other factors. Pain represents exactly the kind of
(07:53):
medical problem Vertex likes to target. There's a long history
of research to build on, there's new technology available or
Vertex thinks they can develop it. There's a large unmet need,
and Vertex thinks it may be possible to make an impact.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
We've picked a set of diseases, cystic fibrosis, type one, diabetes,
sickle cell disease, also pain.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
That's doctor David Altschuler. He's the chief scientific officer at
Vertex Pharmaceuticals. What he's really on is a quest for
something innovative. He's in search of new ways to think
about old problems.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
The real question in our mind is can we succeed?
Can we make a difference?
Speaker 5 (08:36):
Pain itself can be a disease.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
That's doctor Paul Negelescu. He's leading Vertex's research in this area.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
So while pain is a symptom of diseases, many diseases,
it can also be a disease in and of itself.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Vertex has been working on that puzzle for decades.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
There are tens of millions of people in the US
that get pain experiences every year, either acute or chronic pain.
Speaker 6 (09:02):
One thing that really interested me is why does it
seem like some people are more sensitive to pain than others.
Speaker 5 (09:10):
It's a very subjective thing pain, and it's actually we
don't understand what makes different people sensitive or not to pain.
I would say though, that there are outliers. I mean,
there are definitely some people that are way off the
charts in terms of their ability to detect pain or not.
Speaker 6 (09:29):
Would you be able to break down for me a
little bit further into what exactly is pain?
Speaker 5 (09:34):
It's a really good question. So pain is an unpleasant sensation.
It's something that you experience, and so therefore it is
something that has been processed by your brain and depending
on your state of mind, literally that affects your ability
to sense pain. So it's a complicated process by which
(09:57):
we perceive pain. Now, now the way that we're trying
to approach it, which is to kind of take it
out of the brain part, because we know it starts
in the periphery. In most cases, it's due to an
injury or a surgery or damage to a nerve that's
outside the brain, so that part of the body is
(10:17):
sending signals to the brain. It hurts, it hurts, and
then you're processing those signals, and depending on whether you're awake,
a sleep distracted, you feel different levels of pain. Our
goal is to try to cut it off so it
never really gets to the brain. Opioids work at the
level of the central nervous system. They actually suppress the
(10:38):
inputs that are coming into the brain, and so we're
trying to work from the outside of the brain to
reduce the pain signals into it.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That's the unique aspect of Vertex's approach to research, innovative
approaches based on the underlying mechanism of the disease.
Speaker 5 (10:55):
The way we're approaching pain is by targeting these proteins
that have been identified through human genetics as playing a
key role in the transmission of pain signals in the
pain sensing neurons. If you think about the pain sensing
neuron as a wire, it's transmitting a signal that says
I've got pain in one part of my body to
(11:18):
the other part of your body, and for that signal
to get transmitted, it has to be conducted along that wire.
To conduct that electrical signal through that sensory nerve. It's
kind of like a bucket brigade. One channel opens at
one end and it passes the electrical signal to the
next and that gets passed to the next one and
(11:38):
so on, and that's how the signal gets propagated. And
so you know, we're trying to interrupt that transmission.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
The work is focused on researching the mechanism of how
a pain signal travels in the body, with the hope
of making a difference for patients. It's been two years
since Damien's acts, and other than walking with a slight limp,
he's moved on with his life. He doesn't dwell on
(12:06):
those pain filled months after his surgery. In fact, he
says he really doesn't remember most of it.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
You tend to block out memories that you don't want,
you really do. They're painful, So I think that's why
I don't remember more about that time in the hospital.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
What he does remember is that when the pain was
so bad it made it difficult to even stand up,
he never lost his passion.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
I don't want to give up on music. I don't
want to give up on my music. As long as
I'm close to the music and keep playing music, I'm
very happy. So that's what.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
I want to know.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
I want to be at peace.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
This is Targeting the Toughest diseases. A podcast from Bloomberg
Media Studios and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. If you like what you hear,
subscribe and leave us a review. I'm Jordan gos forre
Thanks for listening.
Since you're a subscriber to this Bloomberg podcast, we thought
you'd be interested in a sponsored podcast called Targeting the
Toughest Diseases, produced by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Bloomberg Media Studios.
It explores the innovative tools, methods, and unique philosophy Vertex
Pharmaceuticals is using to search for treatments for some of
(00:21):
humanity's most challenging diseases. Here's a recent episode.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
That's Damian Sanchez or if you are a jazz fan
living in Miami, Damian j Well.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I play all types of music, but yes, my passion
lies in the jazz genre. The history of jazz inspires
me to create. I get very passionate about talking about
the history of jazz from its very beginnings until today.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
His passion started when he was twelve years old.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I saw a picture in a magazine that changed my life.
When I was young. It was a picture of a
young man who was holding every single woodwind could play
them all, and so I wanted to be like that kid.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Damien started with the obo, then the flute, the alto, sacks,
the clarinet, and even the bassoon.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
I also play guitar. I also play piano, and I
also play various percussion instruments, mainly Latin percussion stuff because
it's part of my project to perform Latin jazz.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
But on a day that should have been a musical celebration,
Damien's life took a terrible turn.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I'm Jordan Gospore, a member of the University of Southern
California Center for Health Journalism. This is Targeting the Toughest
Diseases a podcast produced by Bloomberg Media Studios and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
In this series, we look at some of humanity's most
challenging diseases and how Vertex, a Boston based biotech company,
(01:52):
is using innovative tools, methods, and a unique philosophy to
search for treatments and cheers. Today we're looking at a
cute pain. You might think pain is just a sign
that something else is wrong in your body, but Vertex
is looking at pain as its own unique condition. They're
(02:15):
researching it as a disease.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
It's December twenty twenty two. I just finished about a
month of rehearsals with a symphony, A very specific symphony
made up of nonprofit organizations sponsoring young musicians and professional
musicians here that play classical music that is of unheard
of composers of color.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
This was the day of the inaugural performance.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I wake up early that day. It was a Saturday.
We're performing at the Broward Set of the Performing Arts,
this wonderful hall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I live in Miami,
so I grab my scooter.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
See, Damien doesn't like driving. He's not a guy that
likes sitting still, and South Florida's traffic can be bad,
so instead of a car, he uses an electric kickscooter
and public transit. Getting to Fort Lauderdale means riding his
scooter to the train station, taking the train up the coast,
and then using the scooter again to get to the venue.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I have my English hornant and my obow and my
music and my backpack on my backstrapped on. I had
my helmet.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
He's also wearing a brand new tuxedo.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
And I remember looking to the left and looking to
the right and saying, ha ha ah, traffic sucks.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Damien was in the bike lane going down a steep
hill when a driver apparently attempting to get out of
the gridlock, suddenly turned into the bike lane.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I hit the front of her car with my scooter,
which I do not let go of, which actually ends
up flipping over the front of her car. I fly
into the air and I land on my ribs, which
get cracked, and my foot, my right foot get caught
up in the accident, and my tibia and my fibuya
both are shattered in many many places, and my leg
(04:16):
is completely discombobulated, disjointed to the side.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Damien didn't lose consciousness. In fact, he tried to stand up.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
And as soon as I put one ounce of pressure
on that right foot, then the pain started coming in,
very very strong. As you can imagine, I have all
these broken bones in my right leg, and I'm trying
to walk on it and walk it off like nothing
ever happened.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
A crowd gathered and someone called for an ambulance. Within minutes,
he was in the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
The pain in his leg was unbearable.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
This one guy says, we're gonna give you morphine and
we're gonna manipulate that leg until they're ready to operate,
because it needs to be manipulated. I said, I've never
had any drugs. I don't take drugs. They said, well,
you're gonna want it. I said okay, and they gave
it to me through my ivy and I felt like
I was really drunk. And then he grabbed my foot
and put it back in place. I ready didn't feel inebriated.
(05:24):
I was laughing. I was joking, you know. I was
being very bubbly, which I usually am anyways, but I
was kind of scared.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
After a few hours, the drugs were off and the
pain returned. It was time for a second dose.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
I wasn't gonna take anything. I didn't want to get hooked.
My family has a lineage of substance and alcohol abuse.
My brother fights it, and my uncles fought it, and
I've always had that trauma in my brain.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
It's a horrible decision many patients face, choosing between pain
and the risk of addiction. The doctors tried their best
to persuade him.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
They were all about it. They were all about it.
Now you sure, are you sure? You don't want to
think nothing? What are you going to do? I'm just
gonna deal with it.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
And that's what many patients do when faced with acute pain.
They just deal with it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
I never took any pain medication no matter how bad
it hurt. But yeah, the first three months were hell Man.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Pain isn't entirely a bad thing. It's actually an important
warning system. It's our body's way of telling us something
is wrong.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Typically, you expect a broken limb to hurt a lot
when you injure it gradually get better. It'll be a
key for a few weeks, but as it heals after
three months, you would not expect someone to still have
pain from that broken limb.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Doctor Norman Buckley is the director of the Michael G.
Degrout National Pain Center in Hamilton, Canada.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
There certainly are settings where people continue to report pain.
Then you have to consider what's the reason for that,
he says.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Doctors have used medicine to manage pain for centuries. Opium
in the sixteen hundreds, ether and chloroform in the eighteen hundreds,
then morphine and even heroin in the nineteen hundreds. More recently,
insets have been used. Those are nonsterodal anti inflammatory drugs,
and of course opioids, which can be effective but bring
(07:29):
tolerability concerns and carry the risk of addiction. Innovation and
pain management has been slow, in part because pain is
both common and complex. It affects individual people differently. Those
differences might be influenced by gender, genetics, and age, as
well as other factors. Pain represents exactly the kind of
(07:53):
medical problem Vertex likes to target. There's a long history
of research to build on, there's new technology available or
Vertex thinks they can develop it. There's a large unmet need,
and Vertex thinks it may be possible to make an impact.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
We've picked a set of diseases, cystic fibrosis, type one, diabetes,
sickle cell disease, also pain.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
That's doctor David Altschuler. He's the chief scientific officer at
Vertex Pharmaceuticals. What he's really on is a quest for
something innovative. He's in search of new ways to think
about old problems.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
The real question in our mind is can we succeed?
Can we make a difference?
Speaker 5 (08:36):
Pain itself can be a disease.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
That's doctor Paul Negelescu. He's leading Vertex's research in this area.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
So while pain is a symptom of diseases, many diseases,
it can also be a disease in and of itself.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Vertex has been working on that puzzle for decades.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
There are tens of millions of people in the US
that get pain experiences every year, either acute or chronic pain.
Speaker 6 (09:02):
One thing that really interested me is why does it
seem like some people are more sensitive to pain than others.
Speaker 5 (09:10):
It's a very subjective thing pain, and it's actually we
don't understand what makes different people sensitive or not to pain.
I would say though, that there are outliers. I mean,
there are definitely some people that are way off the
charts in terms of their ability to detect pain or not.
Speaker 6 (09:29):
Would you be able to break down for me a
little bit further into what exactly is pain?
Speaker 5 (09:34):
It's a really good question. So pain is an unpleasant sensation.
It's something that you experience, and so therefore it is
something that has been processed by your brain and depending
on your state of mind, literally that affects your ability
to sense pain. So it's a complicated process by which
(09:57):
we perceive pain. Now, now the way that we're trying
to approach it, which is to kind of take it
out of the brain part, because we know it starts
in the periphery. In most cases, it's due to an
injury or a surgery or damage to a nerve that's
outside the brain, so that part of the body is
(10:17):
sending signals to the brain. It hurts, it hurts, and
then you're processing those signals, and depending on whether you're awake,
a sleep distracted, you feel different levels of pain. Our
goal is to try to cut it off so it
never really gets to the brain. Opioids work at the
level of the central nervous system. They actually suppress the
(10:38):
inputs that are coming into the brain, and so we're
trying to work from the outside of the brain to
reduce the pain signals into it.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That's the unique aspect of Vertex's approach to research, innovative
approaches based on the underlying mechanism of the disease.
Speaker 5 (10:55):
The way we're approaching pain is by targeting these proteins
that have been identified through human genetics as playing a
key role in the transmission of pain signals in the
pain sensing neurons. If you think about the pain sensing
neuron as a wire, it's transmitting a signal that says
I've got pain in one part of my body to
(11:18):
the other part of your body, and for that signal
to get transmitted, it has to be conducted along that wire.
To conduct that electrical signal through that sensory nerve. It's
kind of like a bucket brigade. One channel opens at
one end and it passes the electrical signal to the
next and that gets passed to the next one and
(11:38):
so on, and that's how the signal gets propagated. And
so you know, we're trying to interrupt that transmission.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
The work is focused on researching the mechanism of how
a pain signal travels in the body, with the hope
of making a difference for patients. It's been two years
since Damien's acts, and other than walking with a slight limp,
he's moved on with his life. He doesn't dwell on
(12:06):
those pain filled months after his surgery. In fact, he
says he really doesn't remember most of it.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
You tend to block out memories that you don't want,
you really do. They're painful, So I think that's why
I don't remember more about that time in the hospital.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
What he does remember is that when the pain was
so bad it made it difficult to even stand up,
he never lost his passion.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
I don't want to give up on music. I don't
want to give up on my music. As long as
I'm close to the music and keep playing music, I'm
very happy. So that's what.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
I want to know.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
I want to be at peace.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
This is Targeting the Toughest diseases. A podcast from Bloomberg
Media Studios and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. If you like what you hear,
subscribe and leave us a review. I'm Jordan gos forre
Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Tim Stenovec
Carol Massar
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