Male Pill Still Years Away

Dec. 4, 2006— -- It seems that every few months, the male birth control pill is just around the corner.

This month, a new drug from London touted as the next big prospect for the male birth control pill created a buzz.

The quest for the male pill is, in many ways, the search for the holy grail of contraception. More and more people are clamoring for options that would allow men to share in the burden of preventing pregnancy.

A 2005 study showed that nearly 50 percent of men in the United States would be willing to try a new form of birth control, and up to 72 percent of men in other countries are interested in new forms of male contraception.

In reality, however, researchers are approaching male contraception from multiple angles, many of which are closer to reality than the male pill. After all, the British research is still being performed on tissue in petri dishes -- not in animals or humans.

Condoms are extremely effective at stopping the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. But though condoms are up to 98 percent effective at preventing pregnancy when used perfectly, "typical" condom use has fail rates as high as 15 percent.

And vasectomy, in which surgeons cut the tube called the vas deferens that propels sperm out of the penis, is usually irreversible.

So why don't we have a male birth control pill?

"Certainly, contraception has commonly been the responsibility of the woman in the past," says Dr. Peter Schlegel, Professor and Chairman of Urology at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/ Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. "But there's no reason that couldn't change."

Standing in the way, however, are many factors that make it difficult to produce male contraception.

"Stopping all sperm production or disabling all sperm is a real challenge, when you're making [millions of] sperm a day," Schlegel says.

"Male physiology is a lot more complicated than female physiology," says Daulat Tulsiani, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "Initially, [it was] thought there was one molecule on the egg and on the sperm that played a role in their interaction."