The beautiful business of Botox

In his corner office, Mr. Botox looked his age.

He hadn't had a shot of botulinum toxin in a while, and the furrow between his brows was back.

"You would never know I'm really 75 years old," David E.I. Pyott said, trotting out a well-worn joke that he likes to make "because of who I am."

He's the man who made a muscle-controlling poison the most fashionable weapon against aging. And he's really 54.

When Allergan Inc. hired him as chief executive in 1998, it was generating annual revenue of $1.26 billion turning out nasal sprays, eyedrops and optical devices. It still makes eyedrops but otherwise doesn't much look like the company founded in an Irvine bean patch 60 years ago.

Now it's a $3-billion corporation with global rights to the pharmaceutical industry's first beauty blockbuster and a business plan -- based on battling glaucoma, wrinkles, obesity and incontinence -- written to fit an increasingly overweight nation packed with baby boomers.

Beyond that, Allergan has a development pipeline stuffed with potential remedies for a range of problems facing aging adults, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The company plows so much money into research that a few shareholders have complained.

Only a few, though. Revenue was up 34% last year; this year, as sales of Botox and most of its other products exceed forecasts, Allergan expects a 23% rise to $3.7 billion. Net income in the second quarter increased more than 40%.

"People have knocked them a little bit for spending so much" on R&D, said Gary Nachman, an analyst with Leerink Swann in New York. "But that's part of the genius."

As is Allergan's Botox promotion machine, according to doctors.

It stokes demand with slick television and magazine advertisements that share a lot with pitches for lipstick and hair color. They encourage physicians to view Botox as a "gateway drug," one that may lead patients to demand other beauty treatments, such as Allergan's Juvederm wrinkle filler, down the line. The company makes life easier for its "platinum physicians," high-volume Botox buyers, with a quick-answer telephone line to order refills and gives free advice to doctors who ask how to better run their practices.

"They are an intelligent company," said Tracy Hankins, a Las Vegas plastic surgeon with one of the biggest Botox practices in the country. "They think things through."