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 Friday 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.
