September 15, 2010, Updated September 13, 2012

ISRAEL21c broke the story about a new male birth control pill being developed in Israel. Now in a new video feature we take an in-depth look at the development.

A potential treatment developed by an Israeli professor to treat infertility in men, could now form the basis of the first ever birth control pill for men.

Prof. Haim Breitbart of Bar-Ilan University has spent the last 30 years and most of his professional career working to understand the biochemistry of the sperm cell.

In 2006, he authored a paper that described capacitation, which is a process that sperm go through before they can fertilize an egg. He and his team of graduate students discovered that once in the uterus, sperm undergo a variety of changes that prepare them to fertilize an egg; they synthesize certain key proteins that both help them to survive and help them to bind to the egg.

Prof. Haim Breitbart

An understanding of male infertility has helped lead Prof. Haim Breitbart towards a potential contraceptive pill for men.

Breitbart noticed that infertile men don’t produce these proteins correctly, and is now using this knowledge to treat male infertility. He subsequently realized there could be another use for this new information about protein synthesis.

“We had the idea that if we can block this synthesis we would be able to develop a new male contraceptive,” he explains to ISRAEL21c.

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