Male Contraceptive Pill: Mouse experiments show 100% effective contraception within 2 hours

Scientists have developed a drug that can temporarily paralyze sperm, which is expected to become the first on-demand male contraceptive pill. In mice, the drug achieved 100% effective contraception in about two hours, and fertility fully recovered 24 hours later. The related study was published on February 14th in Nature Communications.

Jochen Buck of Cornell University in the United States said, "This is a completely revolutionary breakthrough in the field of male contraception. Most male contraceptives in clinical development take effect only after 8 to 12 weeks."

Previous studies have shown that the movement of sperm requires a protein called soluble adenylyl cyclase (sAC). Men who cannot produce sAC due to gene mutations are infertile. Therefore, Buck and other researchers evaluated whether drugs that inhibit sAC could be used as male contraceptives. If sperm cannot move, they cannot fertilize eggs through the vagina.

The research team evaluated the sperm movement of 17 male mice, of which eight received the drug. In the samples collected two hours after the mice received the drug, an average of only about 6% of the sperm were mobile, while the samples from the control group had about 30% mobile sperm. Melanie Balbach of Cornell University said that the effect of the drug disappeared in about 24 hours, which means that fertility can be restored quickly after taking this contraceptive pill.

In another test, researchers gave the contraceptive pill to 52 male mice for 30 minutes and then paired them with female mice. Two hours later, each pair of mice was mated, but none became pregnant. This indicates that the contraceptive pill is 100% effective. This drug also did not cause any significant side effects, even when the mice received three times the standard dose of a similar compound for 42 consecutive days.

"I like the contraceptive method proposed by this study because it is on-demand," said Ulrike Schimpf of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. "It works quickly and briefly, and the first dose is effective."

Buck and Balbach plan to improve this drug to make it last longer before human trials begin. If everything goes well, they hope to start clinical trials by 2025.

Balbach said, "We need more contraceptive methods so that the burden of contraception is no longer borne by women. We are very optimistic that men taking this contraceptive pill will have the same effect."

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