Researchers hopeful about male partner for ‘The Pill’

BY ALAN BAVLEY | MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Women may say, “It’s about time.” Guys may have the same reaction.

After many overly optimistic predictions, a male version of The Pill may truly be in sight. And a team at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, a nationally recognized center of research into male contraceptives, is working to be among the first to put a new generation of products on the market.

Joseph Tash, a reproductive biologist at KU, has spent a decade tinkering with a chemical compound called H2-gamendazole that keeps sperm from developing in the testes. Men taking a gamendazole “pill” would essentially be shooting blanks.

The expectation is men on the KU pill would experience no change in their libido and, if they stopped taking it, would regain full fertility within a few weeks.

Tash’s work is part of a promising array of new birth control methods for men that are under development in laboratories or already being tested on volunteers. These contraceptives are arriving more than 50 years after the female birth control pill revolutionized relations between the sexes and gave women greater control over their lives.

Outdated attitudes that birth control was women’s work, along with the technical challenges — women release just one egg per month, but men produce 1,000 sperm per second — have slowed development of new male contraceptives. But recent investments in research appear to be paying off.

Men already are testing contraceptives based on hormones that are analogous to the contraceptive pills women take. Meanwhile, researchers such as Tash are working on compounds that target sperm production or activity directly without affecting men’s hormones.

Tash is confident enough about gamendazole that he’s getting ready to ask the Food and Drug Administration what additional studies he’ll need to do before he can start trying it on human subjects. “We have enough data now to actually go to the FDA,” he said.

He will have to meet a high standard of safety for a drug that healthy men would be taking regularly for a long time; FDA approval, if it goes that far, is perhaps a decade away. So far, though, the compound’s safety has checked out in rabbits, mice, rats and monkeys.

Mating tests on rats showed no change in their behavior, Tash said. “And it’s 100 percent effective and 100 percent reversible.”

No formal mating tests on monkeys yet, but those that took it “still seemed happy,” he said.

KU colleagues are working on other promising ways to keep sperm at bay. Leslie Heckert is looking for chemicals that can block the action of a protein essential to an early stage of sperm development. Gustavo Blanco already has a series of compounds that immobilize sperm so they can’t swim to an egg; he’s seeking about 100 volunteer sperm donors to supply him with the raw material for testing the compounds in the lab.

The prospect of a male pill raises plenty of questions: Will men be willing to take it? Will women trust men to take it? Will it have any effect on the divisive issues of birth control?

Contraception for men has long been limited to a small and dismal set of options — condoms, vasectomy, interruption of intercourse. But that hasn’t kept increasing numbers of men from shouldering responsibility for preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Laura Lindberg of the Guttmacher Institute, which does research on reproductive health, traces this change in behavior to the 1980s, when more men started using condoms.

The trend by couples to delay having children had begun, and that created a greater need for contraception. But not all women were able or willing to use contraceptive pills or IUDs. Condoms became a regular part of marriages and long-term relationships.

The ’80s also was the era of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases; condoms became a routine part of safe sex.

“Condoms moved from behind the counter in the drug store to out front, and so did our attitudes,” Lindberg said.