Sponsored by an educational grant from Schering
As you know, testosterone is one of the oldest treatments we have available. The first preparation was on the market in 1940 and for a long time, we had preparations but they were very limited in their suitability for the patient. Although we were very anxious to get better preparations for the patients, it took very long until industry started to do something for our patients.
The one early step in this development over the past 15 years was a symposium in Beijing in China.
Where I saw this preparation being advertised at this Chinese meeting and that was, as you see, testosterone undecanoate for injection. We were familiar with testosterone undecanoate because since the 1970s, we had it as an oral preparation for testosterone treatment in capsules but we didn’t know that you could put it in injections and there were already in 1991 publications in China showing that this preparation was very useful in Klinefelter patients. So I took these samples which I have shown you home and we put them into monkeys and they showed a very long half-life. Then with the allowance of our ethics committee, we could try some patients and we noticed that this preparation had a very long half-life.
And what the Chinese advertisement promised, obviously held true.
Testosterone undecanoate had been traveling from The Netherlands, from Europe to China and it came back to Europe. We had it in patients and in monkeys and we were looking for a company that would be interested. As I said, this was at the very beginning of the new era where companies got interested in testosterone, but finally I found Professor Miguel Beutel, who is also in the audience here and he recognized the potential of this preparation. He and his team worked on the galenics of testosterone undecanoate and finally, after lots of clinical trials, it came on the market as Nebido® and here it is.
It is the topic of this symposium this afternoon and you see a panel of experts who have experience with testosterone, namely Dr. Zitzmann from Munster, Dr. Schubert from Cologne and Dr. Yassin from Hamburg. And finally at the end of their three presentations, Dr. Morales from Canada will tell us his opinion about the measuring of the effectiveness and the safety of testosterone treatment.
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