The many surprising uses of Botox by Lydia Ramsey on Nov 14, 2015, 12:00 PM Advertisement
 Allergan, the pharmaceutical company that makes Botox, is in friendly discussions to be acquired by pharma giant Pfizer. If the merger goes through, it would quite possibly be the biggest of 2015 — Allergan has a market cap of $117 billion, and Pfizer is worth over $200 billion. One of the reasons Allergan is worth so much is Botox, which had more than $2 billion in sales as of 2013. One of the most common pharmaceutical products, Botox is currently known as an anti-wrinkle treatment. However, the drug has many other approved medical uses... CHECK OUT: How Allergan went from a tiny Los Angeles eye care company to one of the biggest takeover targets of 2015 NEXT: Turing Pharmaceuticals claims no patients are actually paying the full $750/pill for Daraprim — here's who foots the bill instead Meet the bacterial neurotoxin that went on to be a medicine.  While studying food poisoning in the 1800s, German physician Justinus Kerner realized that there were neurological components to the Clostridium botulinum bacteria which causes botulism, an extreme form of food poisoning that causes difficulty swallowing, muscle weakness, paralysis, and even death if left untreated. From there, Kerner went on to see if there were any therapeutic effects to the neurotoxins that the bacteria gave off.
Botox's most famous use — treating wrinkles — started as an "off-label" use in the 1990s, but was officially approved by the FDA in 2002.  During the 1990s, while researchers were exploring all the different ways to use Botox, doctors began to use the drug "off-label" (meaning the FDA has yet to approve it) to smooth out wrinkles temporarily. Botox became so popular that at one point in 1997, the US ran out of its supply, inciting a panic for those using it for off-label wrinkle removal. Allergan officially got FDA approval for cosmetic Botox to treat glabellar lines (the wrinkles between your eyebrows also known as frown lines) in 2002.
But Botox was actually first used to treat crossed eyes.  For many years after Kerner's research, botulinum toxin was avoided, in part because there were fears about it getting into the wrong hands and being used as a deadly weapon. But in 1980, ophthamologist Alan B. Scott started looking into botulinum toxin Type A as a way to treat strabismus, or crossed eyes. By 1987, eye doctors used the neurotoxin to correct these crossed eyes with pretty good results.
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