On-Demand Male Birth Control Option Shows Strong Viability in Mice

An on-demand option for male birth control has shown strong viability in a newly released study, with the associated data being released at perhaps the most opportune moment imaginable.

The study, as reported by CBS News and others, was made available to the general public with its timely release on Valentine’s Day by the peer-reviewed Nature journal. In short, the aim here was to put to use a drug that could temporarily hinder fertility by inhibiting soluble adenylyl cyclase (sAC) in mice. Per researchers, sAC is “essential for sperm motility and maturation,” thus temporary inhibition provides a potentially “groundbreaking” option in the development of male birth control.

In theory, a man taking this form of birth control would only need to take one dose to render themselves “temporarily infertile.” In mice, this period of infertility kicked in within 30 minutes of a single dose of the sAC inhibitor, with fertility confirmed to have been “fully restored” the following day.

For now, it’s not known when this potential male birth control option might be given the go-ahead to move on to human studies. To read more on what’s currently known, all thanks to an expansive group of researchers led by Melanie Balbach of Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology, hit this link.

Last March, a separate possible male birth control candidate was reported to be nearing the human trials stage after displaying promising signs of effectiveness in mice research. At the time, that option was said to have shown 99-percent effectiveness in pregnancy prevention.