Male Contraception Year-in-Review 2022

The end of the year always invites the opportunity to look back and reflect upon all that transpired over the previous months that help define the year, whether good, bad, or otherwise. It is an opportunity to introspect and evaluate how yesterday’s actions led to today and help inform tomorrow.

For those interested and working in family planning, history will remember 2022 as the year that The Supreme Court in the United States rolled back reproductive rights by overturning Roe v. Wade and restricting people’s access to reproductive healthcare, the effects of which are still reverberating today. In this context, saying goodbye to 2022 with a sense of pessimism or cynicism would be understandable given the fact that decades of family planning progress is at risk of being undone.

Despite this, we encourage everyone to try and focus instead on the tremendous milestones that were reached over the past 12 months in advancing contraceptive methods for sperm-producers and the leap towards achieving reproductive autonomy for all people that they represent. In this post, we highlight some of the incredible achievements in the field that help bring us even closer to the day when all people have access to the contraceptives they want and need.

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Contraline's first-in-human trials
Our grantee and partner Contraline raised over $7M in funding to advance in-human clinical trials of the world’s first injectable hydrogel designed to provide long-lasting, non-permanent contraception for men and announced the first hydrogel-based male contraceptive implants were performed in humans in a clinical trial.

Next Life Sciences and Parsemus Foundation’s collaboration
Our great friends at the Parsemus Foundation announced that they have partnered with Next Life Sciences to continue development of the Vasalgel male contraceptive. After a decade of research on Vasalgel, the Parsemus Foundation and its social venture spinoff Revolution Contraceptives LLC determined that the reversible, long-lasting male contraceptive was ready to advance to the next level and is excited to collaborate with Next Life Sciences to do just that.

RAR-alpha & YourChoice Therapeutics
Working with MCI’s support, researchers at the University of Minnesota developed a male oral contraceptive that has been shown to be 99% effective in mice without causing any observable side effects. Additionally, the team has partnered with MCI grantee YourChoice Therapeutics to continue developing the target, with the drug expected to enter human trials in the near future.

​Contraceptive Accelerator Network
MCI launched the Contraceptive Accelerator Network (CAN), a for-profit subsidiary that works in parallel with MCI to identify appropriate programs and promising targets to support with the testing and evaluation processes required prior to Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling studies and clinical trials. CAN’s first project is supporting Triptonide, a natural compound that has displayed reversible male contraceptive effects in both mice and monkeys. A single daily oral dose has shown to induce deformed sperm with minimal or no forward motility and, consequently, contraceptive effects in males. This effect has also been shown to wear off in a matter of weeks after animal models ceased consuming the compound.

NES/T’s Success
The hormonal male contraceptive NES/T (Nestorone®/Testosterone) became the first birth control product designed for males to progress past the initial steps in the clinical trial process, and the study recently reached a huge milestone with one-hundred couples successfully completing a full year of the clinical trial. One year on and the “results have been much better than we expected, and we’re very excited,” said Diana Blithe, Ph.D., chief of NICHD’s Contraceptive Development Program.

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​As we say goodbye to a tumultuous year for the field of family planning and reproductive health, let’s look to 2023 and the years beyond with a collective sense of optimism and excitement. Progress is happening in the field of male contraception research and development and with each passing day we move closer and closer to realizing our hopeful vision of a world in which everyone has reproductive autonomy.