A new drug candidate can render male mice sterile within an hour and disappear within a day, an experimental study showed Tuesday. This indicates the potential for future “on-demand” male contraceptives.
The drug, which has not yet been tested in humans and is years away from being commercially available, joins a growing list of male contraceptives in development.
But now men have only two options: condoms and pipe cuts.
Previous drugs have struggled, partly because side effects are thought to be a much higher hurdle for men (because there is no risk of pregnancy) and partly because the pharmaceutical industry isn’t interested. .
“For women, the burden of contraception is now all on us,” Melanie Barbach, a pharmacology researcher at Weill Cornell School of Medicine, told AFP.
“We want new options,” added Balbach, lead author of the study published in Nature Communications.
The researchers focused on an enzyme called soluble adenyl cyclase, which acts as an ‘on-switch’ for sperm, said study co-author Jochen Buck, also of the Weill Cornell School of Medicine.
When this enzyme is switched off, the sperm can no longer move.
In several different tests, the researchers found that compounds that inhibited this enzyme immobilized mouse sperm in 30 minutes to an hour.
The compound showed 100% anti-pregnancy efficacy in the first 2 hours, dropping to 91% in 3 hours.
After 24 hours, the mice’s sperm were moving normally again.
Buck said researchers hope to develop a single, hormone-free pill that takes effect within an hour and lasts for six to 12 hours.
This is in stark contrast to other options in development, such as hormone gels currently being tested in humans, which take weeks or months to work and stop working.
No side effects were observed in mice. Previous studies have suggested that infertile men who permanently turn off the soluble adenyl cyclase enzyme have a higher rate of kidney stones.
According to Dr. Buck, this is because the enzyme is always switched off, which is not the case for men taking on-demand pills.
The researchers hope to have the first human trials within three years, but Bach said the final product could take eight years.
Susan Walker, a contraceptive expert at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK who was not involved in the study, said that, like many other initiatives that have failed, whether the pill will be commercialized is “a little questionable.
But the “significant advantage” of being almost immediate, she said, offers “the possibility of watching your sexual partner take the pill.”
According to founder Steve Kretschmer, consultancy Desire Line is working to predict the penetration rate of various male contraceptives.
“Initial estimates suggest that consumption of the fast-acting, one-to-two-day, on-demand pill in the United States could be three times higher than Viagra when it was first launched,” he told AFP.
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