Flibanserin: Women's Viagra, Finally

In another instance that differentiates men from women, we now are one step closer to a female Viagra, more than ten years after sildenafil citrate in the form of Viagra came onto the market in 1998 from Pfizer Inc.

This new women's drug is called flibanserin, developed by a private Germany-based pharma company called Boehringer Ingleheim. This is the same company that brought us Flomax, used to treat enlarged prostates which can block the flow of urine (luckily for Boehringer the U.S. patent for Flomax actually expired last month).

The reason why it took this long to develop a drug to treat Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) in women is because, as many of us-men and women-will have learned by now, women's sex drive is usually controlled by the brain whereas men's are more physical. So sildenafil worked by increasing blood flow to that crucial male appendage whereas a drug to work on something as complex as the human female brain is much harder to develop.


In fact flibanserin was discovered much as sildenafil was-an usually large number of trial patients would keep the drug even though it didn't work too well as an antidepressant, or what it was initially developed for. So Boehringer started to look into its usefulness in promoting female sexual desire, and presented positive findings today.

Competition's pretty close though: There's another drug still in safety testing called LibiGel, developed by Illinois-based BioSante Pharmaceuticals, which BioSante expects will be submitted for approval and launched sometime in 2011. The thing is LibiGel is an actual topical gel you apply on your arm once a day to deliver testosterone into the blood stream, since testosterone deficiency has been found to decrease female sex drives. Concerning Boehringer's progress with flibanserin, BioSante CEO Stephen M. Simes said it is "important and exciting medical news" for women.

If men are any indication, the quarter after Viagra came out, Pfizer's profits rose almost 40%, and the patent is still in effect (this hasn't discouraged China, although China's not exactly famous for patent protection anyway).

Plus we women are lucky enough to get menopause at some point (this development actually comes at an interesting time when cultural references of cougars have really been proliferating), and even with as many as a quarter of pre-menopausal American women suffering from HSDD according to a study last year, this sort of drug should be very well received.