The Female Libido Pill Is Back

Nothing about this billion-dollar drug’s journey was easy

- Cynthia Koons

This past January, when Cindy Eckert got back the keys to her old office in Raleigh, N.C., she walked into a time capsule. An empty water glass still sat on the receptionist’s desk. Piles of marketing materials were gathering dust. Boxes with three-year-old FedEx labels had never been shipped. It was the first time Eckert had entered the office since she sold—and was then pushed out of—her company, Sprout Pharmaceuticals Inc. She and her then husband started the company to bring to market the first drug to enhance female sexual desire. Since that moment, the story of Addyi, the pink pill, has been frozen in time.

Addyi, the brand name for flibanserin, hit the market in 2015 and the buzz was instant. Inevitably, the media dubbed it “female Viagra.” But Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., which had just bought Sprout for $1 billion, almost immediately faced a distribution scandal having nothing to do with Addyi, and the drug was dragged down with the rest of the company. It’s languished ever since. In a typical month, about 600 prescriptions are filled, compared with almost 800,000 for erectile dysfunction drugs Cialis, Viagra, and Viagra’s generic equivalent.