A Toxic Plant Might Help Us Find a Legit Male Birth Control Drug

The quest to find an effective male birthing control tab is like Charlie Brown from “ Peanuts ” trying to kick the football : Always ostensibly within clasp , only to be stopped by Lucy ( or dissatisfactory subject field results ) at the last second . Most late , in 2016 , a large clinical tribulation of a contraceptive injection wasstopped early , after men describe more side gist than look , include serious excited problems and mood swing — one volunteer even committed suicide during the study . give the chronicle of difficulty in this line of business , we confront a freshly publishedstudywith extremely measured optimism : The writer of a paper in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry say they ’ve trip up onto another potential male contraceptive gadget , a compound derived from a plant extract that Hunter in Africa have long used to produce poison - tipped arrows with .

The extract , bed as ouabain , bottle up an enzyme called Na / K - ATPase , which aid cells pump sodium out and potassium in through their membrane . While this atomic number 11 - potassium pump is found in virtually every type of cell , ouabain ’s effect is most patent on cardiac cellular phone . In these cells , inhibiting the enzyme causes them ( and the heart ) to slow up down . Over the centuries , that ’s made ouabain a sound option as a deadly poison .

But ouabain subdue the Na - potassium heart in matured spermatozoon cells too , which seems to make them crappy swimmers . Our bodies bring out a natural interpretation of ouabain ( in much lower doses than you ’d get from a hunter ’s arrow ) , and men with higher levels tend to have low-spirited fertility rate , study have find . That might make ouabain an sympathetic candidate as a male contraceptive , save up for the possibility of it close your heart down if you took too much .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

To get around this problem , the research worker pick off the chemical substance social organization of ouabain and created three compounds that come out to only inhibit the pump find oneself in sperm cells . They try the most bright of their compounds in live rats , and find out that it render them infertile in just three day . Better still , the chemical compound had zero other detectable side core . And the finicky way it work to reduce fertility also might make it an ideal contraceptive .

“ It only inhibits motility of spermatozoon and does not interfere with sperm cell development , ” aged study source Gunda Georg , head of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Minnesota , narrate me in an email . “ Therefore , it is a very selective factor . ”

Of course , as Georg and her team admit , their finding are just a validation of conception . There ’s still peck of interrogative sentence about their chemical compound , not the least of which is how long the contraceptive effect would actually last in citizenry . That answer would then prescribe a dosing schedule . Georg says her team is already taking the next step and planning to test out their initiation in animal pairing trials , which they hope to complete by this fall . And if thing continue to pan out — again , a very grownup “ if ” in the world of male contraceptive method — they go for to get to human clinical trials within five years .

William Duplessie