Could a birth control drug for men be in the works?

Somewhere, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are punching the air with excitement – because the holy grail may be near. According to a study published yesterday in Nature Communications, Cornell University researchers have developed a male birth control drug that successfully prevented pregnancy in mice.

📅 Background: A working female contraceptive, the birth control pill, was developed in the 1950s. But history is littered with failed attempts at creating a male contraceptive, in large part due to the challenges that biology provides.

• Men make millions of sperm every single day, each of which needs to be altered/disabled in order to prevent pregnancies.
• On the other hand, women’s ovaries typically release one mature egg per month – a far easier target for contraceptives.

⏩ That brings us to yesterday’s study… where Cornell researchers tested a new drug that blocks a specific protein that allows the sperm to move or swim around, rendering them immobile. Upon receiving the drug, male mice were unable to get their mates pregnant for a roughly 2-hour window, after which they regained normal fertility levels and could father normal offspring.

💊 Big picture: No male birth control treatment – not even the “testicle-bath" that won the 2021 Dyson Award for Engineering – has ever made it past human clinical trials. There are two treatments currently undergoing human trials in the US: a male contraceptive gel from UC Davis, and a testosterone-suppressing pill developed by one of the National Institutes of Health.