Exciting news!
Weak pun. Shoot me.
Panel to Review Drug for Low Female Sex Drive
By ANDREW POLLACK
Men have Viagra and other pills to fight sexual impotence. Now women might soon have something roughly equivalent.
Procter & Gamble will try today to persuade a federal advisory panel to recommend approval of the first drug to increase a woman's sex drive.
The company plans to tell the committee, which advises the Food and Drug Administration, that the drug Intrinsa increases the sexual desire of women and the frequency with which they have "satisfying" sex. Some experts say approval of Intrinsa would bring a new era in the handling of women's sexual problems.
"It's a big breakthrough in acknowledging there are medical aspects to sexual dysfunction in women," said Jennifer R. Berman, director of the Female Sexual Medicine Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a consultant to Procter & Gamble. "It's not all in our heads."
But Intrinsa might not sail smoothly toward a positive recommendation from the advisory committee, which will meet in Gaithersburg, Md. The F.D.A.'s own staff, in its review of the data, questioned whether the benefits of Intrinsa were "clinically meaningful" because the drug increased the number of times women had satisfying sex by only once a month compared with a placebo.
In documents posted on the F.D.A. Web site yesterday along with the company's data from clinical trials, the agency's reviewers also said they had concerns about the long-term safety of the treatment, which consists of the hormone testosterone.
