Happy Valentine’s Day.
A new study is showing top marks for a first-of-its-kind “breakthrough” male birth control that can be taken orally.
Scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine have announced that their drug — currently called TDI-11861 — “temporarily stops sperm in their tracks and prevents pregnancies in preclinical models.”
Like penicillin, this “game changer” was discovered unintentionally in 2018 when Dr. Melanie Balbach was researching a protein called soluble adenylyl cyclase, or sAC, for an eye condition. When the drug was given to mice, Balbach observed its sperm-halting capabilities.
“She showed the movie of these sperm not moving, just twitching,” Weill Cornell pharmacology professor Lonny Levin told the Washington Post of the sAC inhibitor, as its called. “I said, ‘Oh my God. That’s a Holy Grail. That’s a male contraceptive.’ ”
When TDI-11861 was given to male mice, 52 different mating attempts with the opposite sex failed to result in a single pregnancy, whereas one-third of the mice control group knocked up their counterparts, according to Weill Cornell.
Their sperm had become immobile for up to two and a half hours — inside and out of the female reproductive tract — before starting to move normally at the three-hour mark, and within 24 hours were entirely “recovered.”
Its sperm-smashing success has the scientists “already working on making sAC inhibitors better suited for use in humans,” Levin said.
Along with the team boasting the efficiency of TDI-11861, Balbach also noted how quick it can spring into action.
“Our inhibitor works within 30 minutes to an hour,” she said. “Every other experimental hormonal or nonhormonal male contraceptive takes weeks to bring sperm count down or render them unable to fertilize eggs.”
That adds an “exciting” element to the medicine, as it could be used by men on command, right before hitting the bedroom, University of Minnesota medicinal chemistry professor Gunda Georg said.
“The twist they have with this paper is that … they’re trying to develop an on-demand male contraceptive agent. I think that’s a really exciting way of thinking about it,” Georg told the Washington Post.
“You could just pop a pill right before intercourse and then be protected,” the department chair said.
Up next for the prospective pull-out alternative is the repeating the experiment on a different organism, Weill Cornell said. Once that “groundwork” is laid, then human clinical trials could commence.
This comes on the heels of a vasectomy trial that saw a slew of volunteers more than willing to participate in the experiment in Australia in November.