A recent New York Times opinion piece said that for researchers working on a male birth control pill, their work has never been more crucial than in a post-Roe America. Recent surveys show that an increasing number of men are interested in pharmaceutical contraceptives and have been working on a male birth control pill for some time at the University of Minnesota.

The study recently entered a new phase – the future of human trials. Host Tom Crann spoke with Gunda Georg, Regent Professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at U of M, about what a male birth control pill might look like.

Do you agree that Roe’s fall to Wade added urgency to your work?

I totally agree. I also read, I think it was also in the New York Times, that vasectomy requests have increased in the country. So I think there is a realization that men need to be involved even more in contraception.

Tell us what you developed and how it would work.

They call it YCT529. And from a scientific point of view, it is an inhibitor of a protein called retinoic acid receptor alpha. Our collaborator Deborah Ohm was at Columbia University many years ago and identified that if you knock out this particular protein in mice, male mice become sterile. And so we’re trying to replicate that, of course, with a pharmacological approach. And what our collaborator showed was that in mouse mating studies, it was 99% effective. So really, it’s very similar to female birth control, but ours isn’t hormonal.

What you have developed here is a male birth control pill that is 99% effective, but does not make the person taking it permanently infertile. For example, if you stopped taking it, would it stop working?

Absolutely. You want something to induce infertility and once the drug is off you want full fertility back. And Deborah was able to show that it was.

You’ve been working on this for several years, has there been enough funding, resources and interest to get things done? Or was it harder to fund male birth control than female birth control?

Yes, you bring up a very good point, about 20 years ago a major pharmaceutical company halted research on a male birth control pill. They continue to work on female birth control, but not male.

Why do you think that is?

There are probably lots of reasons. Some people think it’s a bias, that men may not want to take on this responsibility. But I’m more optimistic than those who say, of course, it’s a risky business. When you develop a drug for a disease, you can tolerate some side effects. When you are developing a birth control pill for men or women, the tolerance for side effects is very low because you are basically treating healthy people.

From a pharmaceutical company’s bottom line perspective, that may be too high a risk. Although I have to say I’m not totally pessimistic that they might eventually not come into play.

We were able to license our compounds to a start-up, YourChoice Therapeutics. On Sunday, on Twitter, I learned that they raised $15 million, which is fantastic. They’re an incredible team helping to bring this to the clinic.

So once they generate phase 1 clinical trials, which we are planning for the end of the year, I think if we can show that they are effective, reversible and, of course, without side effects, that maybe the bigger actors could come at that time.