June Newsweek calls Viagra the "hottest new drug in history almost everywhere in the world. December Pfizer announces it has hired Bob Dole for a television campaign aimed at raising awareness of male impotence. In the next season, Samantha takes the little blue pill herself to enhance her sexual experiences.
PE: The 'other' male sexual problem. Sanjay Kaul presents research at the 49th Annual Scientific Session of the American College of Cardiology that suggests patients died while taking Viagra in the first year the drug was on the market. I want to emphasize that in no way are we trying to imply a cause-and-effect relationship," Kaul told WebMD at the time.
August 19, The FDA approves Bayer Corporation's vardenafil hydrochloride, sold under the brand name Levitra, to treat erectile dysfunction in men. The side effects for Cialis are similar to Viagra, and men with heart problems or abnormal blood pressure are advised against taking it.
The name on the prescription bottle does not match his. By the time that episode of SNL aired, Viagra had been on the market for just over two years: enough time, it would turn out, for the little blue pill to dissolve into American popular culture so thoroughly as to be mocked on network television. And in late-night jokes that delighted in winky double-entendres.
And in music. And in movies. Viagra—and, later, drugs with different names but a similar effect—changed the way some Americans have sex. More than that, though, it changed the way many Americans talk about sex. It was Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, was testing sildenafil citrate for its potential ability to lower blood pressure.
Viagra, an innocent-looking little blue pill, proved that big things do come in small packages, lifting the spirits of millions of men who suffer from impotence. Viagra benefited, as a business venture, from the fact that, just seven months before the pill was approved, the FDA had eased its restrictions on direct-to-consumer medical advertising; as a result, the drug was among the first pharmaceutical products to be publicly advertised.
Pfizer was aware that the public-messaging capability presented both a challenge and an opportunity: Its new product, being what it was, would need to overcome several taboos at once—about sex, certainly, but also about aging and masculinity. It sent a delegation to the Vatican to test how the pill would be received among Catholic leaders.
The company, using its findings, focused its marketing efforts initially on selling Viagra as a medical solution to a medical problem. It focused its messaging on men with debilitating medical conditions. So, it was brought into a phase one clinical trial in the early s , to test whether humans can tolerate a new compound. All seemed to be going well—except for one weird thing the men enrolled in the study did when nurses went to check on them.
The sildenafil was working—but in the wrong part of the body. Viagra was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use as an erectile dysfunction drug in About a decade later, researchers began running new clinical trials to see if it could double as a heart drug as originally intended.
Sure enough, in , the FDA approved the same compound for a heart condition called pulmonary arterial hypertension, which constricts the blood flow to the lungs and affects both men and women. The drug that makes Viagra work is now also sold under the name Revatio, for pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Recently, a large-scale clinical trial found that canakinumab Ilaris a drug used to treat one form of arthritis made by Novartis, could also be used to treat heart disease after researchers understood that inflammation may play a role in the latter.
Before that, in , the compound bimatoprost Lumigen , which was made by Allergan to treat high eye pressure, was approved to enhance eyelash growth under the name Latisse after people taking it kept reporting the glamorous side effect.
And the compound finasteride was first used in the drug Proscar, made by Merck, to treat swollen prostates, but was later approved to treat baldness under the name Propecia when patients reported they noticed hair changes after taking the drug.
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