(Sprout)
Sprout CEO Cindy Whitehead, at center, won approval for her drug flibaserin this week.
This week's biggest news in health has been over a controversial little pink pill designed to increase the libidos of women who struggle with chronically low sex drives.
The pill, called Addyi, is for women with chronically low sex drives. It sends chemicals to the brain to stimulate sexual desire and is taken daily, and it has some pretty serious side effects when it interacts with alcohol.
Sprout Pharmaceuticals — the company behind the pill since 2011 and got it FDA approved last week — was acquired by the drug company Valeant Pharmaceuticals on Thursday for $1 billion.
Business Insider spoke with Sprout's CEO Cindy Whitehead over the phone about the big news, and what she thinks of the first drug approved for women's sexual health.
Business Insider: Was the Valeant deal something you guys had hoped for in the long run for Sprout?
CW: I think we were so mission-driven just to get to finish line of completing all the science and getting to an approval of a drug. I think what this affords us is to do that in a way that we as a 34-person company wouldn't have otherwise been able to, and I think that means ... affordable access for more women.Things like copay assistance programs and those that we'll be able to be more generous with than we would have been able to be at Sprout alone.
And ultimately having now opened this door for women in the United States, we can go into other markets in which women also don't have a medical treatment for this condition, even if the prevalence data looks exactly the same.
[Acquisition talk] has been very recent, I think. After the [FDA] advisory committee meeting, companies saw the possibility that we were going to get to this first for women. They were interested, and that's really when discussions started happening.
But it became clear for us I think very quickly that Valeant was the right partner because our entire team stays, and we will run this, and we will continue to do this in a way that we see is right for women.
BI: Will the acquisition effect the October 17 entry date to market or the target price range of about 400 per month?
For the women. I've actually been in the field of sexual medicine for some time. I saw this spectacular science that was going to be abandoned, and I thought it was going to be abandoned frankly because of a society unwilling to have a frank discussion about the biology of sex for women. And the need was just too great.