Will caffeine one day be obsolete? Heralded in Europe as a breakthrough for narcolepsy, a novel drug--Provigil--which appears to keep non-narcoleptics awake as well, could soon be available in U.S. pharmacies.

Narcolepsy strikes roughly 1 in 5000 people, causing sudden sleep attacks lasting from seconds to more than an hour. Stimulants such as amphetamines are the usual treatment, but they can become addictive and cause patients to "crash" after the high wears off.

But Provigil appears to be nonaddictive and to have few side effects, says Dale Edgar, a researcher at the Stanford Sleep Disorder Center in California. "There's no euphoria; it just holds sleep at bay," says Edgar, whose lab did some of the research for the drug's manufacturer, Cephalon Inc. of Westchester, Pennsylvania. Indeed, in one trial, narcoleptics taking Provigil stayed awake roughly 50% longer than those given placebos. Scientists are unclear how the drug works, although Edgar says it raises FOS protein levels in cells near the brain's circadian clock.

"It's not a magic bullet," says Sharon Merritt, director of the Center for Narcolepsy Research at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Still, she says, it could find a big market among people--from shift workers to students--who simply wish to fight sleep. Indeed, the drug has already caught the eye of military researchers. Ross Pigeau of the Defense and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine in Toronto, Canada, kept 14 military reservists working for 64 hours on Provigil and found that although they did worse on cognitive tests than well-rested subjects, they did as well as those on amphetamines.

A Cephalon spokesperson says product labeling discussions are in the works, and that the company hopes to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration this year.