(HealthDay News) -- There's a new, potentially faster-acting competitor on the horizon for Viagra (and Levitra and Cialis) in the battle against impotence.
It's called avanafil, and it's made by Vivus Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based drug company.
Five presentations on the drug, all sponsored by Vivus, were made last year during a meeting in New York City of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America, at which doctors and other health professionals are spending four days discussing subjects once regarded as unmentionable in polite society.
The marketing of Viagra created not only a new name for a diagnosis of impotence -- erectile dysfunction -- but also a new openness about all aspects of sex. A sign at the New York Hilton, where the meeting is taking place, directed attendees to the "premature ejaculation breakfast."
Like the sex-enhancing products now on the market, avanafil is a PDE5 inhibitor, meaning it blocks the activity of a protein that prevents blood vessels from expanding. Other reports presented at the meeting, including one by scientists in Japan, indicated that avanafil is better at concentrating its activity on PDE5 than other drugs in its class.
Avanafil's great advantage for its potential users, said Dr. Joel Kaufman, an associate clinical professor of urology at the University of Colorado, is that it acts faster than the other PDE5 inhibitors, taking effect in about 30 minutes, and disappears from the body faster.
Because of that fast action, "the duration of side effects presumably will be shorter," Kaufman said, while those men who use it won't have to wait as long.
Avanafil's relatively quick disappearance from the bloodstream should lessen doctors' concerns about "drugs that are being used on a daily or near-daily basis," he said.
Kaufman reported on the largest human trial to date of avanafil, in which 295 men took various doses of the compound, and reported on its effectiveness and side effects. The effectiveness was "excellent, similar to what we see with other PDE5 inhibitors," while the side effects were minimal, he said.
In formal terms, that was a Phase 2 study in the sequence of trials required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to bring a medication to market. Vivus already has discussed a Phase 3 trial with the FDA, said Timothy E. Morris, chief financial officer of the company, and hopes to begin it "some time next year."
The trial would take 18 to 24 months, Morris said. If all went well, it might take another year or so to gain FDA approval, meaning that avanafil could be marketed by about 2007.
Avanafil may be the newest PDE5 inhibitor closest to marketing, but it is not the only one under development. Several papers were presented at the meeting on a PDE5 inhibitor so new it has no name, simply designated "SLx-2101."
And researchers are exploring other variations on the theme, such as a PDE5 inhibitor whose activity might last 24 hours or longer.
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