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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)
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:59PM
Nah, the pitch is different form that. Try this one instead:
* Same drug as current pill you're already on
* More convenient than a once-a-day dose
* During trial period hormone levels will be monitored periodically to ensure correct dosage is achieved (can warn patient if effectiveness is compromised)
During the initial trial a closely-monitored patient would have less likelihood of becoming pregnant, not more.
Honestly, if the delivery mechanism works as designed this would probably be a big improvement in outcomes compared to the current remember-to-take-your-pill-every-day dosage schedule many women are on. Most forms of birth control work perfectly if used perfectly; it's the human error ("I forgot to use a condom that one time") that drives up the stats for births per year per thousand women using a particular method.
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