The ability to silence pain messages at their source in the periphery, without dampening
neuronal activity elsewhere within the nervous system, is a holy grail of pain research that
has focused interest on “peripheral” ion channels as potential therapeutic targets. Sodium
channel Nav1. 7 has emerged as a key target in this search, due to its preferential
expression in pain-signaling neurons within dorsal root, trigeminal, and other sensory
ganglia, and its role as a threshold channel that sets the gain and regulates the excitability of …