A male contraceptive is closer than ever thanks to the development of a 'game changer' drug by scientists. The experimental drug which has been tested on mice can stop sperm swimming for up to two-and-a-half hours and has so far shown no side effects.
The non-hormonal drug, which has been two years in the making, is being developed by close friends and pharmacology professors Dr Lonny Levin and Jochen Buck and their teams at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The pair did not originally set out to find a male contraceptive drug, but thanks to the work of a colleague they discovered a way to stop sperm in it's 'tracks' by switching off a particular cellular signalling protein called soluble adenylyl cyclase (sAC).
The team of scientists have now created a drug called TDI-11861 which stops the mice's sperm from swimming for up to two-and-a-half hours. After three hours some sperm begins to regain mobility and after 24 hours the sperm is healthy again.
During the test, male mice that were given the drug failed to impregnate female mice despite 52 attempts while mice that weren't given the substance impregnated almost one-third of their partners.
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The experiments are part of a collaboration between the Dr Levin and Dr Buck's laboratories and the team are hoping to conduct more tests that will eventually lead to human clinical trials. The labs are being supported by the Weill Cornell Medicine Enterprise Innovation based in New York who described the drug as a 'game changer'. They added that the study, published in Nature Communications on February 14, 'demonstrates that an on-demand male contraceptive is possible'.
Dr Melanie Balbach, is a post doctoral associate in the lab who made the discovery about blocking sAC. Speaking about the breakthrough she said: "Our inhibitor works within 30 minutes to an hour. Every other experimental hormonal or non-hormonal male contraceptive takes weeks to bring sperm count down or render them unable to fertilize eggs."
If the drug development and clinical trials are successful, Dr Levin said he hopes to walk into a pharmacy one day and hear a man request 'the male pill'.
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