Pharmaceutical maker Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) is looking to create a lot of pre-emptive buzz for its gamble on the female sex drug market, flibanserin. Flibanserin is being developed as a non-hormonal treatment for low sexual desire in women, a market that's thought to be more financially lucrative than even the $2 billion dollar erectile dysfunction market.
On Monday they orchestrated several media releases, webcasts, and a presentation at a major sexual medicine conference in Europe, all to release data from Phase III trials on pre-menopausal women labeled with low sex drive (also k, or HSDD). The next few days and weeks will reveal how effective this first of many blitzes is likely to be.
All of this has everything to do with marketing and little to do with science. The data hasn't been released and no breakthroughs have been discovered. Still it's an opportunity to get a little more acquainted with a drug that changes brain chemistry and they hope will change, or direct, the global conversation on female sexuality.
