Male birth control might be right around the corner, and it sounds pretty damn cool

September 25, 2017 8:53 PM

Researchers have been talking about male contraception for years, but it actually might be on the horizon.

For decades, scientists have been trying to find a foolproof way to prevent pregnancy.

There's the old, questionable pull-out method, when a guy who's about to ejaculate hurriedly withdraws his penis to keep the baby juice away. There are condoms. There's the IUD. And then there's the pill, which uses a cocktail of estrogen and progesterone to prevent ovulation. But there's no real male birth control method that's equivalent to the pill (and no, the Jiftip does not work).

Sure, guys could get a vasectomy and tie their tubes, but that's a huge medical commitment. Earlier this year, scientists were able to show that rhesus macaques were rendered sterile after using Vasalgel, a non-toxic, injected gel that offers the potential to be a "reversible" vasectomy for men who might not want to be dads right now, but want to be a pop later on. Vasalgel, however, is still in the experimental stage, it hasn't been reliably proven to be reversible, and it's expensive.

The quest for the male contraceptive is about to take a turn, according to an article in Science News that looks at the future of contraceptives. Apparently, we are tantalizingly close to a male contraceptive, thanks to a breakthrough from a synthetic compound called H2-gamendazole.

So what is H2-gamendazole? In the mid-2000s, along with his team at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Joseph Tash started looking at an anticancer drug with the unique ability to almost erase sperm production. The drug turned out to be potentially dangerous to human males, but Tash and his team were intrigued about its potential as a male contraceptive. So they worked in the lab to create a version of the anticancer drug that would be palatable to males and maintain its sperm reduction superpower. That lab-created compound was H2-gamendazole.

H2-gamendazole works by stepping in during the last stage of sperm development, before the little swimmers become full-fledged sperm. Sertoli cells help nourish the sperm up to this point by being literally tethered to them so that they can only swim away when they're developed. H2-gamendazole steps in at this crucial stage, snipping away this tether before sperm can really become fully developed, which means the suckers are destined to die by the testes. If there’s no perfect sperm, there’s no way sperm can ever even make it to the ovary for conception, which means this very well might be an effective method of male contraception.

There have been numerous tests done with H2-gamendazole: in one study, rats were given one oral dose of H2-gamendazole once a week, and within two weeks, they were sterile. But here's the kicker: H2-gamendazole is apparently reversible, because ten weeks after they were taken off their once-a-week dose, the rats were fertile again. Tash's team replicated this experiment with mice, rabbits, dogs, and monkeys, and for each animal, there was a "block in sperm production just exactly like we see in the rats," he told Science Magazine. Because it can be taken orally, the testes are especially responsive to it, which means that H2-gamendazole doesn't have a chance to mess around with other tissues and produce unwanted side effects.

Tash and his team were understandably excited, and in 2013, H2-gamendazole earned a significant distinction as the first nonhormonal contraceptive to be approved by the FDA. In March, H2-gamendazole was approved for further research. But until we get more information, maybe don't rely on the pull-out method so much, guys?

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