The Woman Who Invented Viagra
Dr. Gill Samuels, director of vascular biology at Pfizer, oversaw the discovery of compounds for reducing hypertension and migraines. More famously, she was part of a team of thousands working at Pfizer that invented Viagra, as she humbly lets everyone know.
The discovery, she said, came in 1985 after 13 years of intense team work and laboratory experiments. She said: "We were looking at various disorders in vascular contraction when we came across this new class of compound that could relax blood vessels. I have heard people call it a lifestyle drug but I don't think of it like that. It has caused men to think differently about their health. It has de-stigmatised erectile health and as someone who had to review all the letters of patients, who say 'It has stopped me killing myself' or 'It has stopped me hitting my wife', that I realise what a good medicine it is," she said.
Since becoming available in 1998, sildenafil, the chemical name of the little blue pill known as Viagra, has been the a leading treatment for erectile dysfunction; its primary competitors on the market are tadalafil (Cialis) and vardenafil (Levitra).
Pfizer's patent 5,250,534 in the USPTO for Viagra will expire on March 27, 2012, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on its website here, at which point any drug company will be able to make and sell a "generic" version of the blockbuster erectile dysfunction (ED) drug.
