Viable male contraceptive delivered to testes
Viable male contraceptive pills may be closer to human trials following the successful development of a system to deliver a promising candidate drug direct to the testes.
The drug adjudin has been shown to induce reversible infertility in rats,
but it has low bioavailability and, when taken orally at doses high enough
to be effective, results in liver inflammation in some animals. To circumvent
these problems, researchers from the Centre for Biomedical Research in
New York and the University of Rome developed a novel approach for delivering
adjudin direct to the testes (Nature Medicine 2006;12:1323).
They administered the drug parenterally and used a modified follicle-stimulating
hormone as a carrier. This enabled them to induce reversible infertility
in rats with a dose 100,000 times smaller than the oral dose needed to
produce similar results and without the accompanying liver inflammation.
Meanwhile, another compound which had shown promise as a male contraceptive
in animal studies has been found to have no effect on spermatogenesis
in men (published
online, 25 October
2006).
Miglustat, which induces reversible infertility in mice, had no effect
on sperm concentration, motility or morphology in normal men after six
weeks of therapy, the researchers found. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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