Bloomberg Businessweek USA - 12.08.2019

B U S I N E S S

1

Bloomberg Businessweek August 12, 2019

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BREA SOUDERS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

13

Edited by

James E. Ellis and

David Rocks

The

Unfulfilled

Promise of

On-Demand

Birth

Control

Big Pharma can make

lots more money elsewhere,

so contraceptive innovation

has lagged

Since the contraceptive pill transformed women’s

lives almost 60 years ago, there’s been precious

little innovation in birth control for women.

Now a company in San Diego claims to be on the

verge of something that could advance the field:

a gel women can apply an hour before sex, with-

out having to mess with their hormones. “There

hasn’t been innovation in this category in decades,”

Evofem Biosciences Inc. Chief Executive Officer

Saundra Pelletier says. “It’s time that women have

the opportunity to have sex on demand, like men

have had with condoms for years.”

That’s a powerful message. But look more

closely and Evofem’s product, Amphora, is also a

case study in why real advances in birth control

are so rare. With plenty of consumer interest in

an easier-to-manage female contraceptive, you’d

think there’d be many more choices. Yet Amphora

is a little-changed version of an over-the-counter

lubricant cleared for sale more than a decade ago.

The reason there aren’t more and better options

for women is simple: money. In the era of $20 bil-

lion blockbusters such as the arthritis drug Humira

and $2 million-a-patient gene therapies to treat rare

diseases, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t see

a big payoff in rolling out products that don’t have

record-breaking potential. Bayer AG’s Yaz family