Desire Drug for Women Ð Coming Soon

Anyone who has ever stayed up late has suffered through the assault of commercials for Extenze or Smiling Bob donning a Santa suit with a long line of ladies waiting to tell him how naughty they've been now that he's packing a Yule log.

With over one billion dollars in sales made in Viagra's first year of production, it would seem an obvious choice to create the female version of this revolutionary drug, no? Decreased sexual desire is a serious problem according to a survey conducted by German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim. They asked 31,000 women in the United States over age 18 and found one in ten were concerned with their dwindling sex drive.

The drug sparks a huge debate and places the family-owned Boehringer dead center as to whether the medicine is a chemical shortcut around a more complex dysfunction involving the body and mind or whether disinterest in sex is a legitimate medical condition.

"This drug has the potential to finally open the door to acceptance of the idea that decreased desire can be something that involves a dysfunctional way the brain works, and not only a bad partner," Jim Pfaus, a neurologist at Concordia University in Montreal told Bloomberg. "Of course it's in your head."

The potential revenue for reviving the female libido is not to be ignored. Sales are expected to exceed $2 billion a year reached with erectile dysfunction treatments because more women report sexual problems, BioSante Pharmaceuticals Inc. Chief Executive Officer Stephen Simes estimated.

In the late '90s, Boehringer was looking into medication to treat depression when it came across the compound called flibanserin. The pharmaceutical company has been studying flibanserin for more than a decade and has yet to publish clinical test results showing the drug is effective but will do so on Monday at the European Society for Sexual Medicine conference with data from trials of more than 5,000 European and U.S. women.

"This is for some an ideological battle," said psychiatrist Michael Berner of the Freiburg University Clinic, who had patients in Boehringer's studies. "One view is the multi-dimensional view you get from people like me. And then you have these people that say you should work only on relationship issues and that medication cannot have a place."

If flibanserin is approved, it will be the first success in a long line of failed attempts by drugmakers, including Procter & Gamble and Pfizer. Currently, the only female sexual dysfunction therapy approved in the U.S. is Eros-CTD, from NuGyn, Inc., a suction pump that fits over the clitoris. Noven Pharmaceuticals manufacture Intrinsa, a testosterone patch sold exclusively in Europe for women whose uteruses have been removed. A U.S. version was put on hold due to concerns about its long term safety use.