Nicotine Replacement Therapy: Historical background

In the late 1960s, Dr Ove Fernö was studying why smokers found it so difficult to give up. One of his friends, Dr Claes Lundgren, had noticed that submariners who were not allowed to smoke could cope by switching to chewing tobacco. Fernö was convinced that the key to the problem was abstinence from nicotine, and postulated that tobacco craving and withdrawal symptoms could be controlled by providing smokers with nicotine from an alternative source. However, pure nicotine is not easy to deliver – nicotine is an unstable compound. Various nicotine delivery forms were tested, and a chewing gum formulation in which nicotine was bound to a resin (to prevent the drug from being released too quickly) was launched as the first NRT product - Nicorette® Gum - in the global market in 1978. Continued development resulted in the introduction of the Nicorette® Patch in 1992, Nicorette® Nasal Spray (1994), Nicorette® Inhalator (1996) and Nicorette® sublingual tablet (1998). The name Nicorette® derives from nicotine delivered in the ‘right’ (= rätt, in Swedish) way.