Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 11 2019, @01:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-long-is-a-month? dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

A Once-a-Month Birth Control Pill Is Coming

Unless, that is, you embed them in a flexible silicon ninja star that folds up neatly into pill form.

That's the solution a team led by scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital and MIT came up with about five years ago. Back then they were building slow-release pills designed to deliver treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. But in a scientific first, they've now demonstrated that the same invention can also deliver a steady drip of contraceptive hormones in the body of a pig for up to 29 days.

"From an engineering aspect, the key novelty is the ability to deliver a drug for a month after a single ingestion event," says Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women's and MIT, who co-authored the new study, published today in Science Translational Medicine. The proof-of-concept experiments were conducted late last year. Since then, the long-lasting contraceptive has begun to be commercially developed by a Boston-area company called Lyndra Therapeutics, which Traverso cofounded with MIT bioengineer Robert Langer in 2015. In July, the startup received $13 million from the Gates Foundation to advance the monthly pill to human trials, with a focus on bringing it to low- and middle-income countries.

A once-a-month oral contraceptive, Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aay2602)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:00PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:00PM (#931092)

    deliver a steady drip of contraceptive hormones in the body of a pig for up to 29 days.

    My Greek buddy wants to know about sheep. He says nobody fucks pigs!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:07PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:07PM (#931097)

    I hear they have to fuck pigs in a lot of countries just to stay in business :)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:40PM (#931118)

      Q: What do you want to be when you grow up, Andy?
      A: I don't know, but I don't want to be a pig fucker like my daddy!