This is the first in a two-part episode on Male Birth Control. The next episode will be released 9/26.
GRACE AIGNER: Hi everyone! I’m Grace Aigner from the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.
Our topic this week probably hits close to home for a lot of listeners. If you’re not using it, then you likely know somebody who is. At the very least, you might’ve gotten a mildly uncomfortable demonstration about it in your middle school health class room. You guessed it, I’m talking about birth control. But not your typical condom or morning-after pill, a new type of contraceptive: an oral birth control pill made for men, being developed right here at the University of Minnesota.
This episode is the first of a two-part series on the male pill. We’ll hear from scientist Gunda Georg from the University of Minnesota’s College of Pharmacy and her team’s research partners to learn why they’re pursuing the new pill, how it works and how it could benefit you.
Georg, is a medicinal chemistry professor at the University and has spent 20 years researching male contraception. She’s dedicated her career to finding a new method of birth control because there is significant demand for it.
GUNDA GEORG: As a researcher and medicinal chemist, you’re kind of thinking about, what is a medical need, right? So, of course there are many of them and I’ve worked in other areas in cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and I’m still working on those. But definitely contraception is a need I think worldwide for women, for couples.
So I think it is important that there would be more options to family planning and the like. And still about 50% of all pregnancies worldwide, including the U.S. are unintended. And so, having more options would hopefully prevent those unplanned pregnancies.
AIGNER: The male pill, called YCT 529, prevents pregnancy by stopping a retinoic acid of vitamin A from binding to a specific protein which produces sperm, Georg said. This pill is non-hormonal, unlike most female birth control pills.
Georg teamed up with Akash Bakshi and Nadja Mannowetz from YourChoice Therapeutics to develop the pill. YourChoice is a California based company dedicated to improving family planning and contraceptive care options for men and women.
Bakshi said YourChoice’s healthcare goals led them to collaborate with Georg and develop YCT 529.
AKASH BAKSHI: We started Your Choice Therapeutics in 2018 and the vision of the company, and I think the mission of the company has not really changed. It has been to do two things. Firstly, develop the future of family planning, and also to improve the health and wellbeing of men and women. And in 2018 the vision of the company was to develop a non-hormonal female contraceptive. And that is where we started.
AIGNER: Bakshi, Mannowetz and Georg agree that developing the new male pill is about giving people and couples more options and more control over their contraceptive use and fertility.
GEORG: I don’t have a bias against hormonal birth control pills. It’s just that we need different options, right? Because some people may be really responding well and don’t have a lot of side effects with a hormonal pill, others do, right? And so it’s really all about providing different opportunities.
AIGNER: From pills to implants to surgical procedures, 54% of U.S. women between the ages 15 to 49 use the array of contraceptives available to them. According to 2023 data from the CDC, oral contraceptive pills were the second most popular type of contraceptive used by women.
However, the options for male contraceptives are limited to two choices, Bakshi said: use a condom or get a vasectomy.
BAKSHI: The reality is, clearly condoms are not meeting couples where they are at. And you know, I think we know men don’t like using condoms and we have heard that women don’t like when men use condoms. So, we must accept this, that this is where demand is at.
AIGNER: Between 2014 and 2022, the use of condoms during sex by teenage boys decreased by 9% across three continents, according to 2024 data from the World Health Organization.
BAKSHI: So as a consequence, we must consider if people are moving away from at least an effective method, albeit not a highly effective method, and are moving towards a less effective method of contraception, there must be something that we do that can help these kids make better life decisions that could ultimately alter the rest of their life.
AIGNER: The female pill, which typically interacts with a person’s hormones to prevent pregnancy, is known to have drastic side effects such as blood clots, stroke, heart attack and nausea. So far, the male pill has shown no side effects in clinical trials.
Carina Heller, a neurologist at the University of Minnesota who studies the effects of hormonal birth control on the brain, said hormonal birth control pills can negatively impact mental health, too.
CARINA HELLER: It makes total sense that the birth control pill holds the power for influencing the brain. While some individuals are able to stabilize their mood swings using hormonal contraception, up to 10% of contraception users report mood related side effects such as depression, anxiety or irritability.
And also starting the pill during adolescence has been linked to a higher risk for depression later in life. So given these results and these findings, it’s not just interesting, it’s essential that we study how the pill affects the brain to find out who’s benefiting from oral contraceptives and who’s not.
AIGNER: Heller, inspired by a lack of existing research on how the female pill affects the brain, conducted her own unique study. She did 75 MRI scans of her own brain to see how it changed before, during and after being on the pill. She saw significant changes in how her brain regions interacted with one another during her menstrual cycle.
Mannowetz said the harmful side effects and health impacts many women have dealt with on hormonal pills encouraged YourChoice to pursue this change in contraceptive care.
NADJA MANNOWETZ: We have talked to so many women and pretty much each person told us about the negative side effects she had to deal with. So, the demand is clear, the problem is clear, so we set out to develop family planning products that are hormone free. And I think this to this day is very important to us.
AIGNER: Georg, Bakshi, Mannowetz and their team are not the first people to try creating a male contraceptive pill. In the 1950s, a group of scientists from New York and Oregon thought they had struck gold when they accidentally discovered a medication that stopped sperm production, with seemingly no side effects.
That was until one of their test subjects, a prisoner at a state prison in Salem, Oregon, snuck whiskey into his cell and quickly became violently ill. He told the scientists about his reaction, and they realized their new contraceptive discovery was doomed.
While the medication successfully interrupted enzymes in the testicles from producing sperm, it also stopped enzymes in the liver from processing alcohol, causing the prisoner to go immediately to a hangover, and if he had drank anymore whiskey, potentially death.
Since then, male birth control options have gone under produced compared to the hormonal female pill which came out in the 1960s. After that, birth control and long-lasting contraceptives have been the responsibility of women, Heller said.
HELLER: Well, contraception has traditionally been framed as a woman’s responsibility. A male pill could help shift that narrative, making contraception a shared responsibility between the partners. I don’t think that this change would happen overnight, but it would encourage more balanced conversations about which method to use and what it means to live with the side effects that each method also brings.
AIGNER: Bakshi, Mannowetz and Georg see this new male pill as an attempt to help men and women not only share the responsibility of using contraception, but to make it more reliable.
BAKSHI: Let’s envision, I don’t know if the club is still very relevant, but let’s say that two people meet at the club and you know the mood is right and they decide to do whatever, and let’s assume that the condom breaks. Then what happens?
And so we must take into account that, you know, the only reversible male contraceptive has a particularly high failure rate. And would it not have been better if a male individual was on a male contraceptive pill and also used a condom?
AIGNER: This new pill introduces a new layer to social and sexual relationships. Women may have to decide whether or not to trust if a man is on the pill and men may have to decide whether or not to take it. We’ll dive deeper into this social conversation in part two.
But what’s next for the male birth control pill? More, hopefully larger, clinical trials to prove the pill’s safety and effectiveness. Georg expects the trial process for the pill to be faster than other drugs. She said she’s confident in the future of YCT 529 and that men are, in fact, interested in taking it.
GEORG: I am sort of a bit over optimistic perhaps, but I think I have good reasons. I think the effectiveness can be monitored very quickly, and so I guess this is different than with other drugs where it’s more difficult to determine how effective something actually is.
The research shows that men are very willing to participate more and that they would take a male birth control pill if it was available. So that’s really, I think, encouraging and it shows that men are willing to share that responsibility.
AIGNER: After today’s deep dive into why scientists are developing a male birth control pill, what stops sperm production and why condoms aren’t as trustworthy as we wish they were, I hope you’re interested in how a new male pill could change contraceptive use, sex and social dynamics. So stay tuned for my next episode when we’ll switch gears to hear what students think about a male birth control pill.
That’s all I’ve got for you today, folks. This episode was written by Grace Aigner and produced by Ceci Heinen. Thanks for listening and if you have any questions, comments or concerns, don’t be afraid to send us an email at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you!
My name is Grace Aigner, and I’ll talk to you next time on In The Know.
