Injections Can Sterilize Men for Ten Years
June 2nd, 2011
You can almost tell who’s name is going to come up in a story like this.
Via: Wired:
Ever since the birth control pill was approved by the FDA in 1960, scientists in the West have been looking for a male equivalent. It’s been a rocky road, in part for biological reasons: Hormonally, it’s much easier to control a single monthly event like ovulation than to try to stop the endless onslaught of sperm.
An equivalent “pill” for men would somehow have to stop sperm production without neutralizing their libido or erectile function. Pharmaceutical companies and government agencies have sunk millions into hormone-based contraceptive research that has yielded few viable products.
And then there’s RISUG. Rather than shutting down sperm production, with the potential side effects that entails, it acts more like a tollbooth on the sperm superhighway. As the negatively charged sperm pass by, they are essentially zapped by the positive charge of the SMA polymer. So a RISUG-injected man will still ejaculate millions of sperm, but most will be dead: tails snapped off, cell membranes ruptured.
As a contraceptive, RISUG faces a far more difficult road to approval and commercial acceptance than, say, a new antidepressant medication. While an antidepressant would be considered a success if it worked in 75 percent of patients, a contraceptive like RISUG will be compared to a conventional vasectomy, which works more than 99 percent of the time. Furthermore, it has to be free from the serious side effects that were common with early experimental hormone-based male contraceptives. And it cannot cause birth defects down the line—ever. “Nobody wants another thalidomide,” says Ron Weiss, the Canadian vasectomy doctor.
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“If it’s no longer a crazy Indian idea and it’s something that’s working in India and in rabbits in Ohio and in the first 20 men in the US,” Lissner says, “then there’s got to be a point where there’s just no excuse for a Gates or a Buffett not to get on board.”
Just this past year, in fact, Guha received a $100,000 Gates Foundation grant to pursue a variation of RISUG in the fallopian tubes as a female contraceptive.