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Biotech / Medical : VVUS: VIVUS INC. (NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mkilloran who wrote (21445)	4/27/1999 2:48:00 PM
From: Little Gorilla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23519

May 1999 Scientific American: SEX RESEARCH ADAM'S RIB? Broadening Viagra's reach may elucidate the physiology of female sexuality No sooner had the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Viagra for sale last year for male erectile dysfunction than women began asking themselves and their doctors, "Will it work for me, too?" Women are already experimenting with Viagra on their own, and reports of the drug's success are surfacing in women's magazines and on the Internet. But the question of whether the drug really alleviates Pfizer in New York City, completes its clinical tests of the drug in women. One thing is clear, however: Viagra has prompted women as well as men to think and talk about sexual dysfunction. Perhaps most important, Pfizer's efforts to prove that the drug works in women are beginning to add money and mainstream respectability to the field of female sexuality--an area of investigation that historically has suffered from a lack of funding as well as from thinly veiled snickers.Men's sexuality is only marginally better understood.) The amount of research funds currently available for studying female sexuality is difficult to assess. Although the contraception and reproductive research, most of it is related to contraceptive development and infertility. The majority of funding for research on the female sexual response in the past has come from a patchwork of private foundations and philanthropies. Pfizer commits roughly $2 billion a year to R&D, but spokeswoman Marianne Caprino declines to disclose how much of that goes to Viagra studies. Viagra works by concentrating blood flow in the genital region. One of the chief hurdles Pfizer will face in evaluating the drug for use in women is devising an objective method for measuring a woman's sexual response. To analyze erectile dysfunction in men, investigators use an apparatus called a plethysmograph to measure the firmness of a man's erection. But female sexual arousal is more complex: it involves the erection of the clitoris, which contains spaces that fill with blood just like the penis does; engorgement of the labia and vaginal walls; and vaginal lubrication. To measure female arousal, scientists use a tampon-size device called a vaginal photoplethysmograph, which uses light to assess the extent of vaginal engorgement. The technology is similar to that of blood pressure monitors that fit on the finger. Comparatively little is known about the physiology of the female genitals. Irwin Goldstein and Jennifer R. Berman of Boston University Medical Center are now planning to map out the blood vessels and nerves that supply the vagina and clitoris. There are early indications that women are wired a bit differently from men: Cindy M. Meston of the University of Texas at Austin has found that the sympathetic nervous system, which is primarily concerned with processes involving the expenditure of energy, may be more important for female than male sexual arousal. Meston says Pfizer's work to have Viagra approved for women has "brought a lot of attention" to the field of female sexuality research. "Viagra's been wonderful," she says. "I've gotten more research money in the last couple of months than in the last seven years combined." The need for a treatment for female sexual dysfunction is clear. In February, Raymond C. Rosen of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New JerseyRobert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway and his colleagues analyzed data from the National Health and Social Life Study, which surveyed 1,749 women and 1,410 men in 1992 in the first large study of sexual behavior in the U.S. since the Kinsey reports of the early 1950s. They wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that a surprising 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men say they experience some degree of sexual dysfunction, including lack of desire or pleasure in sex and an inability to climax. Scientists expect that Viagra will only ameliorate some of these symptoms because the human sexual response depends heavily on psychological factors that the drug will not affect. Indeed, the first paper on Viagra's effectiveness in women is negative. In March, Steven Kaplan of Columbia Presbyterian Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital reported in the journal Urology that Viagra did not significantly improve intercourse satisfaction or sexual desire in a small sample of 33 postmenopausal women. Pfizer is currently testing Viagra in several hundred women in Europe. Caprino says the company expects to present the results of this trial within the next several months. After that, Pfizer plans to begin large-scale clinical trials that will include women in the U.S. --Carol Ezzell