Professor John Amory

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76 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 1 May

Professor John Amory’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Unexpected Elements · The soaring price of condoms · 1 May 2026 podcast

We just finished a large trial of 462 couples, including sites in Africa and South America.

This was to test the contraceptive efficacy of a daily testosterone and nestrone gel.

And that study is about to be published.

The hope is that that study will lead to even a larger so-called phase three study that would allow for the drug to be approved and then introduced to the market.

In parallel with those efforts, there's a lot of people working in other approaches to male contraception, and I kind of divide them into three categories.

The first category is contraceptives that block sperm transmission.

You could think of condoms and vasectomy in that category.

There's a couple companies working on injecting reversible hydrogels into the vas.

Then there's other work looking at Category 2 male contraceptives, and those are ones that block sperm production.

So those have the advantage of the fact that the sperm count goes to zero, which is a very effective contraceptive.

The problem with those is shutting down sperm production is challenging, as I mentioned.

And then also there's a delay in onset.

Notably, there's actually a study of a daily pill going on in England right now.

It's called YCT-529.

And it's a drug that blocks not hormones, but something called retinoic acid, which is the active form of vitamin A. Turns out vitamin A is necessary to make sperm.

So this is a novel approach being tested actually right now in England in a phase two study.

And then the last kind of category that really hasn't made it to clinical trials yet, but it's being studied in a laboratory are contraceptives that block sperm function.

One of the unique things about sperm is they swim.

You know, very clever chemists can develop inhibitors of those functions.

And that's been tested to a degree in animal models, but not in humans, to my knowledge.

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