LAUSR

Nearly one decade before the first humans set foot on the moon, the birth control pill for women was developed and made available to the public to meet a level of global demand for contraception that many would argue is akin to ameliorating world hunger. Fast forward to more than six decades later, despite an international race to find a male contraceptive pill that has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars, not a single pill for men exists on the market. Part of the reason for this is simple. Hormones act powerfully in the body to influence fertility, and the female pill is a hormonal method. While manipulation of male hormones could be used to cause infertility in men, the side effects have thus far been deemed too dangerous and unsafe to be considered a viable option. Therefore, the quest for a male pill is driven by a relatively unified agreement across the male contraceptive development community that the best drug candidates must target fertility in a nonhormonal manner—or carefully engineered hormonal manner—with perfect to near-perfect efficacy (unwanted pregnancies cannot and must not result when used properly). Furthermore, the best candidate drugs must do so in such a way that they are safe and result in minuscule to no side effects. To achieve this, to ensure safety, many investigators start by looking at druggable protein targets that are present only in the male reproductive tract, or in sperm cells, to help safeguard against effects occurring elsewhere in the body. The next step is to identify drug targets for which genetic studies show that animal models lacking the gene are sterile, not subfertile, to help predict that a