A New Breed of Nonhormonal Birth Control
The Brink – by Jessica Colarossi
When it comes to birth control options for women, little has changed in the past couple of decades. In fact, according to Planned Parenthood, there are only three birth control methods that are over 95 percent effective at preventing an unintended pregnancy: the birth control implant, the intrauterine device (IUD), and the birth control shot. All of them require time at a doctor’s office, and none of them protect against getting or spreading sexually transmitted infections. The “newest” of the trio—the Depo-Provera shot—started to become available to women in the 1990s.
“There’s a need for good on-demand nonhormonal contraceptives,” says Deborah Anderson, a Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine professor of medicine. An expert in immunology and reproductive health, Anderson leads BU’s Contraceptive Research Center, which is one of only three federally mandated contraceptive labs in the country. This year, the center received a $7.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to continue developing a new breed of contraceptives and STI-prevention products. The four-year award will support Anderson’s work on the use of monoclonal antibodies—lab-made proteins that act like the body’s natural antibody defense system—as a means of protection. She calls her manufactured antibodies “plantibodies,” because they’re grown in tobacco plants.
Her team’s lab-made contraceptive and STI-prevention antibodies, though far away from hitting the shelves of your local pharmacy, have been under development for more than a decade, with promising results coming from the first phases of clinical trials last year.
“Our ultimate goal is to have a contraceptive that also protects women against sexually transmitted infections,” Anderson says.
Full article available at: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/new-nonhormonal-birth-control/