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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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:55PM (#931124)

    Voluntary birth control is a far cry from sterilization.

    Not all that far. It's all right there in the lower abdomen/pelvic region.