The time when a man walks into a pharmacy and asks for the 'male pill' is closer.
At least that's what Lonny Levin, a professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, believes.
Levin is, together with Jochen Buck, also a pharmacologist at this university, the main author of the research known today where
the efficacy of a contraceptive molecule in male mice has been shown
.
But for that moment to come true, the results of the study in an experimental model have to be replicated in other experiments with animals and, if all goes well, in clinical trials.
However, the truth is that the development of the possible drug has started off on the right foot.
This is reflected in the results of the experiment published in this week's issue of
Nature Communications
.
The research, supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), identifies a possible non-hormonal contraceptive that could be taken shortly before sexual activity to inhibit fertility for a while
, a capacity that would recover the next day.
The male pill
candidate
works
by blocking an enzyme essential to sperm function, soluble adenyl cyclase
.
This protein is necessary to activate the sperm's ability to swim and mature, so that it can travel through the female reproductive tract and fertilize the egg.
Luz Candenas de Luján, senior scientist at the CSIC and researcher in Reproductive Biology at the Chemical Research Institute, who has not participated in the work, stated in statements collected by SMC Spain that "what is interesting about this study is that the drug
is It targets a very specific enzyme in sperm
(one of the isoforms, ADCY10, is almost exclusively expressed in these cells) and, although there are other, more widely distributed isoforms, I think they've hit the nail on the head."
A key that has been touched almost by chance, as sometimes happens in science.
Levin's and Buck's groups
were not initially looking for a male contraceptive
, but were joining forces to isolate the soluble cell signaling protein adenylyl cyclase (sAC), which had resisted biochemicals for years.
Finally, after two years of effort, they succeeded, and thus they merged their teams into a laboratory where they focused their research on sAC.
In 2018, one of the lab's postdoctoral scientists, Melanie Balbach, discovered while working on sAC inhibitors as a potential treatment for an eye condition that mice given a sAC-blocking drug produced sperm
that couldn't be propelled forward. forward
.
Looking at that effect in more detail, they found that another team found that men who lacked the gene encoding sAC were infertile but otherwise healthy, leading them to consider sAC inhibition as a safe contraceptive option.
The compound,
named TDI-11861, has shown in various tests that a single dose administered orally immobilizes mouse sperm
and prevents their maturation, without interfering with the sexual functioning of the animals.
In the experiments, the male mouse showed normal mating behavior with the females, but without fertilizing them, despite 52 different attempts.
Contraceptive efficacy was maintained at 100% during the first two hours, and at 91% after a third hour was added
.
In contrast, male mice treated with an inactive control substance fertilized nearly a third of their partners.
The effect of the compound disappears three hours later
, when the spermatozoa begin to recover their motility.
Within 24 hours, almost all function normally again, and the males regain their fertility.
No side effects were reported by the compound that was administered continuously for six weeks in males or females.
"Our inhibitor works within 30 minutes to an hour," Balbach says in a statement from Cornell University.
"
All other experimental hormonal or non-hormonal male contraceptives take weeks to reduce sperm counts
or render them unable to fertilize eggs," he adds, referring to other forms of male contraception under investigation, a field that, for now, has only garnered attempts. frustrated.
"It takes weeks to reverse the effects of other hormonal and non-hormonal male contraceptives in development," he continues.
"Since sAC inhibitors wear off in a matter of hours and men would only take them as often as necessary, they could allow men to make day-to-day decisions about their fertility."
Key to the work has been the collaboration of the Tri-Institutional Therapeutic Discovery Institute (TDI), an organization that works with Cornell University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Rockefeller University to accelerate early-stage drug discovery.
For the scientist Luz Candenas de Luján, "
other attempts have been made to develop male contraceptives, but, for the moment, none of these drugs have managed to reach the clinic
. Although this research has been carried out in mice and the conducting clinical trials to corroborate the efficacy of the drug in humans, this study opens the door to the development of the first single-use contraceptive pill for men, offering an interesting alternative to the exclusive use of oral contraceptives in women".
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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