KU Researchers to Test a Male Partner for ‘The Pill’ - KansasCity.com
Women may say, “It’s about time.” Guys may have the same reaction.
After many overly optimistic predictions, a male version of The Pill may truly be in sight. And a team at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, a nationally recognized center of research into male contraceptives, is working to be among the first to put a new generation of products on the market.
Joseph Tash, a reproductive biologist at KU, has spent a decade tinkering with a chemical compound called H2-gamendazole that keeps sperm from developing in the testes. Men taking a gamendazole “pill” would essentially be shooting blanks.
The expectation is that men on the KU pill would experience no change in their libido and, if they stopped taking it, would regain full fertility within a few weeks.
Tash’s work is part of a promising array of new birth control methods for men that are under development in laboratories or already being tested on volunteers. These contraceptives are arriving more than 50 years after the female birth control pill revolutionized relations between the sexes and gave women greater control over their lives.