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- YCT‑529 male pill passes U.S. safety trial, no major side effects reported
- Non‑hormonal drug blocks vitamin‑A receptor, stopping sperm production initiation
- Study doses up to 180 mg showed unchanged hormones, mood, heart rate
- Requires three months of daily use to start or restore fertility
- Other male contraceptives coming: NES/T gel, ADAM reversible vas‑block implant
Lads, the time has come. There’s a male birth control pill on its way, and if we ask the ladies in the room, it’s about damn time.
It’s been a great run for the rubber industry, and the vasectomy boys need a shoutout, too, but the ladies in our lives have been holding it down for too long with hormonal birth control pills and painful IUDs. It’s our turn to carry some of the birth control burden, and with the new pill passing a safety trial in the US, it’s just around the corner.
Created by YourChoice Therapeutics, a single ascending dose study showed that up to 180mg of YCT-529 had no effects on heart rate, hormone (follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, and testosterone), sex hormone-binding globulin or inflammatory biomarker levels, sexual desire or mood, which is a substantial requirement in contraceptive development. We don’t know how effective the pill will be at reducing sperm yet, but when you consider nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended, that information couldn’t come sooner.
The first non-hormonal oral contraceptive for men, YCT-529, blocks a vitamin A metabolite from binding to its receptor in the testes, preventing the chain of gene-expression changes required to start the sperm-making process. Sounds complicated, but Stephanie Page, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the study and spoke to scientificamerican.com, says, “We really need more reversible contraceptive methods for men.”
However, Page doesn’t go quite so far as to say that the large claim of no side-effects on a small 16-person human trial should be taken so literally. “I think it would be overstating the data to say they know much about side effects yet,” she told the website. “Every medication on the market has side effects.”
It takes three months for the body to produce mature sperm cells. That means the pills would take three months to become effective, and three months to resume normal sperm production.
YCT-529 is not the only reversible male birth control method being developed. There’s a gel called NES/T in the clinical trial pipeline in the US, which is applied daily to the shoulders and upper arms before being absorbed into the bloodstream through the skin. There’s also a hydrogel implant called ADAM, which acts as a reversible vasectomy by blocking the vas deferens.
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