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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:44PM
You described "typical use" measurement. There is also the "perfect use" metric, which tries to control for that and to make sure the technique is correctly used (e.g. fertility awareness not measuring the same time everyday or putting condoms on incorrectly). The problem with both measurements is that people provide false information: not mentioning that they both use a condom and withdraw, saying they use a condom every time when they don't, following proper diaphragm timing protocols, etc. In one study I read after going down that rabbit hole, they found that people misreported various measures more than half the time. In the case of the pill, they found that almost 80% of respondents misreported data enough to significantly affect their individual fertility from the reported data, and a large percentage misreported the sexual activities (both amount and type) they participated in.