The contraceptive pill will (also) soon be a man’s story. In the United States, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have developed a non-hormonal male contraceptive pill. This device is capable of temporarily stopping sperm. These findings were published on February 14 in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
For the moment, this approach has only been tested on mice with encouraging results. Indeed, in rodents, this pill has been shown to be able to neutralize sperm for thirty minutes after taking it. While some sperm began to regain motility after three hours, almost all regained normal motility within 24 hours. “Our inhibitor works in 30 minutes to an hour. All other experimental hormonal or non-hormonal male contraceptives take weeks to reduce sperm count or render them unable to fertilize eggs,” says Dr. Melanie Balbach. It was while working on the treatment of an eye condition that researchers observed the value of a cell signaling protein called soluble adenylyl cyclase (sAC). Thus, they found that mice given this drug produced sperm that were unable to propel themselves forward and reach the egg.
Quoted by the BBC, Professor Allan Pacey, Professor of Andrology at the University of Sheffield, welcomes these initial results: “There is a pressing need for an effective and reversible oral contraceptive for men, and although many different approaches have been tested over the years, none has yet reached the market. The approach described here, to remove the key sperm enzyme that is essential for sperm movement, is a truly novel idea. The fact that she’s able to act and reverse so quickly is really, really exciting. If the mouse trials can be replicated in humans with the same degree of effectiveness, this might just be the male contraceptive approach we’ve been looking for. It really opens up the prospect that we can have human trials. These experiments would lay the groundwork for clinical trials that would test the effect of sAC inhibition on human sperm motility. A first step towards a male pill.
