One step closer towards male contraceptive

By Matt Shea

Women get all the fun — baby making, menstruation and birth control. Men, however, just need to worry about what time dinner will be served. Okay, we kid.

In news that will frighten the lazy miscreants among you, researchers led by Gunda I Georg, of the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy, have taken a promising step towards creating a male contraceptive. The team presented their findings at last month’s American Chemical Society Meeting in San Diego.

Bringing any male contraceptive to market seems straightforward. You make a pill that affects male sperm. But when you stack up what needs to be done to make it effective, the challenge becomes intimidating: it needs to be soluble so it can be swallowed, it needs to work quickly and it can’t be allowed to diminish libido. It needs to be safe to take for decades and it also needs to be reversible, with no lingering ill effects on sperm or embryos.

However, the search remains an important one, particularly when you consider some women can’t take birth control medication.

"It would be wonderful to provide couples with a safe alternative," Georg said in a press release.

The team’s promising breakthrough is about being able to better tweak existing compounds. For example, a change added a polar group to a molecule, which made the test compounds more soluble. Another replaced an amide bond with a different bond that mimics amide, improving the test compounds’ stability (which means it lasts longer in the body). The end game is to refine the chemical structures to achieve a balance of solubility, specificity and stability.

Also, this isn’t hormonal. Researchers have long played around with hormones such as testosterone to create a male contraceptive, but to no avail.

Still, don’t get too excited: the team needs to make sure there aren’t any side effects. So a workable model isn’t here yet.


Source: Askmen