
According to a recent USA Today article, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have tested a non-hormonal drug on mice that can make them temporarily infertile. The best part? It lasts for only a matter of hours, with minimal side effects and no irreversible damage. The new drug targets a protein called soluble adenylyl cyclase (sAC), which stops the protein from waking up the sperm, so they remain dormant after ejaculation and cannot swim up to the uterus.
The team behind the research says that their approach is for men to only take the pill whenever they want to be infertile. As soon as they don’t want to have sex or have a family, they don’t take the inhibitor and their fertility is recovered. Although the study shows promise, it may take years for men to benefit from this kind of birth control as results in mice don’t always translate to humans.