Cialis

Lilly ICOS is preparing to launch Cialis, a prescription drug that treats erectile dysfunction, and executives must decide how to position Cialis against market leader Viagra and recent entrant Levitra. Excerpt UVA-M-0685 CIALIS In November 2003, Matt Beebe waited for final FDA approval of Cialis (pronounced “See Alice”), a new treatment for erectile dysfunction (ED) from Lilly Icos. ICO was Lilly's biotech partner in the Cialis launch, and Lilly Icos was a 50/50 joint venture that held marketing rights for Cialis in North America and Europe (the joint venture also received royalties from Lilly for Cialis sales in the rest of the world). Beebe was Eli Lilly's U.S. team leader for Cialis. Early returns from other countries suggested that Cialis could take significant share from Viagra, but Lilly's plans for a U.S. launch were complicated by the September launch of Levitra, a competing treatment for ED marketed by Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline. Given the early success of Levitra, Beebe and his colleagues wondered what changes—if any—they should make in their launch plan for Cialis. Erectile Dysfunction According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the term erectile dysfunction could refer to (1) the “total inability to achieve erection,” (2) the inconsistent ability to achieve an erection, or (3) a “tendency to sustain only brief erections.” As a result, estimates of the incidence of ED ranged from 10 to 20 million. Inclusion of those with partial ED raised the estimate to 30 million. One widely cited study of 1,290 Massachusetts men aged 40 to 70 shed some light on the extent of variations in the severity of ED. In the study, which occurred in the late 1980s, 17.2% of the respondents rated themselves as minimally impotent, 25.2% as moderately impotent, and 9.6% as completely impotent. (Relative to men who classified themselves as not impotent, men in the “minimally impotent” category reported the same level of sexual activity but experienced more frequent difficulty obtaining an erection [50% of the time versus 5% of the time for nonimpotent men]). . . .