![]() "It's an open question how well this approach would translate from mice to humans," he adds. ![]() John Amory, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, who is currently researching a form of male hormonal contraception on human subjects, says the new compound is a "great idea." "The idea of an on-demand pill that could potentially impair fertility is exciting, but any time a study is done in mice, you have to repeat it and make sure it's valid in humans, too."ĭr. Michael Eisenberg, a urologist and director of the Male Reproductive Medicine and Surgery Program at Stanford Medicine. "The prediction is, after half an hour or after five hours or after eight hours, sperms do not move - and a day later, two days later, they are back to normal," he says.Įxperts not affiliated with the study find it promising, but caution that drugs that work in mice don't always work in people. Within 3.5 hours, it was 91% effective.īuck has great hopes that it will work the same in humans. Within 2.5 hours after getting the drug, it was100% effective at preventing pregnancies. In those hours, the male and female mice in the study had plenty of sex. And it was temporary - it stayed in the system for several hours. Further research showed that it was fast-acting, taking about fifteen minutes to have an effect. In humans, this could mean they would never make it out of the vaginal canal past the cervix into the uterus. The drug stopped sperm from swimming, slowing their fast-beating tails to a twitch. We can have an on-demand male contraceptive.'" ![]() "Lonny's reaction was, 'Wow! This means we could develop a male contraceptive,'" Buck recalls, "And my reaction was, 'Lonny, it's even better. They were stunning: After the male mice were injected with the compound, their sperm did not move. Shots - Health News In the hunt for a male contraceptive, scientists look to stop sperm in their tracksīalbach presented the results to Buck and lab co-director Lonny Levin at a lab meeting the following week. Balbach agreed, provided she could also check what happened to the male mice's sperm, since she knew the drug acts on an enzyme related to male fertility. But the student was scared of mice so she asked another post-doc, Melanie Balbach for help. Five years ago, a graduate student at Buck's lab wanted to test it in mice as a possible treatment for an eye disorder. ![]() The compound's potential value as a male contraceptive was discovered on a whim. "Our lab found the on-switch that turns sperm on to move," says Jochen Buck, a pharmacologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-author on the paper, "And we've now developed a compound which inhibits it." (Though tested in mice, many species including human males have the same enzyme.) Researchers tested a compound that blocks an enzyme sperm need to swim, suggesting a path to a fast-acting, temporary form of contraception. 14 in the journal Nature Communications, presents a novel approach to male contraception that looks promising in mice. Scientists are making progress on more options for sperm-producers. So the work of preventing unwanted pregnancies often falls to women, who might take daily birth control pills, get an IUD implanted, wear vaginal rings, use a diaphragm – or when all else fails, take the morning-after pill. The existing options for male contraception are condoms, vasectomies or abstinence. Researchers are testing a promising approach to male contraception, one that involves immobilizing sperm.
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