The Food and Drug Administration(FDA), federal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, is going to decide early part of this week whether to authorize the world’s 1st drug designed to boost a woman’s sexual desire. The medicine flibanserin, made by Sprout Pharmaceuticals, small drugmaker from North Carolina, is made to increase the desire in human being’s better looking gender.
The path for flibanserin has been a bumpy one, in part because the science is little understood, and in part because there is disparity on what makes a “normal” sexual desire.
The husband-and-wife that founded Sprout Pharmaceuticals is not new to the pharmaceuticals or even to marketing medicines to people who are frustrated with their intimate lives. The couple’s last company, Slate Pharmaceuticals, sold an surgical insertion under the skin for the controlled release of a testosterone pellet to men with low levels of the hormone.
But Slate’s marketing ploy ran into difficulty with federal rules, making unsupported statements about the benefits of testosterone therapy while minimizing it’s risks. When the FDA met to examine the drug last year, it considered the Slate’s commercial as an example of inappropriate marketing.
That account worries Sprout’s critics, who see a trouble in the aggressive tactics it has used to request the FDA to approve the women’s desire drug, which was rejected twice because of insipid effectiveness and side effects such as nausea, fainting and dizziness.
The search for a drug to increase women’s desire has been something of a quest for the pharmaceutical industry since the great success of Viagra for men in the late 1990s. Companies Pfizer, Bayer and Procter & Gamble who all studied, but then abandoned the prospective treatments for decrease in woman’s sexual desire.
