Superhuman DNA: How Big Pharma Turned Painless People and Unbreakable Bones Into Journavx and Evenity
Pharmaceutical companies have spent a decade mining a handful of people whose DNA does things the rest of us cannot. The pitch in 2016 was science-fiction: painless people, unbreakable bones, billion-dollar drugs. The drugs arrived.
Steven Pete, of Washington state, carries a mutation in SCN9A, the gene that builds the NaV1.7 sodium channel that ferries pain signals through peripheral nerves. He can take a stab wound without flinching. That is not a gift. Because he cannot feel damage, his left leg was so wrecked he faced amputation. Timothy Dreyer, of Johannesburg, carries a mutation in SOST that overbuilds bone. He has walked away from car wrecks that should have shattered him.
Bloomberg’s original reporting framed both men as « genetic gold. » The industry listened. SCN9A and the related NaV1.8 channel became the template for a non-opioid pain class. On January 30, 2025 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Journavx (suzetrigine) from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, an oral NaV1.8 blocker and the first genuinely new pain medicine in more than twenty years. Encoded Therapeutics followed in October 2025 with preclinical data on a one-time gene therapy meant to silence SCN9A itself. The bone side paid off earlier: studying people who overbuild bone through SOST produced romosozumab (Evenity), a sclerostin-blocking osteoporosis drug that tells the body to grow new bone.
The hunt did not stop at pain and bone. Companies still chase « super-immune » holdouts, people who do not get fat or diabetic on the same diet as everyone else, alleles tied to slower aging, and families that almost never get a particular cancer. Artificial intelligence now does in hours the genetic comparison that used to take a lab months.
The ethical problems are the same ones bioethicists flagged when this reporting first ran. Who owns a mutation found in one body? What happens when a company patents a pathway that exists because a child cannot feel a broken bone? Who gets the drug — the person who volunteered their genome, or whoever can pay? The FDA’s revolving door into industry has not gotten smaller. Journavx is a real medicine. It is also proof that « superhuman DNA » was never a comic-book headline. It was a business plan.
The AEGIS Alliance will keep watching who profits from the outliers, and whether the people who donated their genes ever see the upside. Related: our reporting on the U.S. government’s own cannabis patent and the rest of Science News.
