Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unplanned. And despite the many birth control options for women in the U.S., 1 in 5 say they aren’t using their ideal method. A startup biotech company in Flagstaff says the answer is birth control for men. And they’re working to make that idea a reality.
In a conference room at NEXT Life, chief science officer Rob Kellar holds up a vial of amber-colored liquid. It’s birth control in a bottle, but it’s not a pill.
"If you could see what I have in my hand as I tilt it, the hydrogel in its liquid form looks a lot like fluid honey, pretty fluid honey," explains Kellar.
It’s called Plan A, and Kellar says it’s meant to be injected into the vas deferens—the tube that carries sperm—where it interacts with the chemistry of the human body and solidifies, "kind of like the bottom of the Jello pan," Kellar says. "But it has a porosity, it has a micro-architecture that has holes in it. So it will allow fluid to flow through, but it won’t allow larger particles like sperm cells to pass."
Scientists in India developed the formula in the 1970s and NEXT Life bought the license in 2022. Kellar and NEXT Life CEO L.R. Fox give a tour of their laboratories, where a stir bar busily spins inside a beaker, mixing up a small batch of the hydrogel to use in experiments. One machine, heated to the temperature of the human body, forces real, donated sperm through a pressurized tube to test the filter’s effectiveness.
Across the hall, Fox says, is another instrument he calls "the Ejaculator Three Thousand." Chadrick Jennings shows off the instrument, which repeatedly squeezes the Plan A filter.
"What’s nice about this setup is we can actually set the amount of cycles or ejaculations to run it for, so we can do the longevity of the filter," Jennings says.
The goal is ten years of protection with one injection, reversible at any time with a second injection that dissolves the material and flushes it out. It’s called a LARC – Long Acting, Reversible Contraception. NEXT Life says it’s the holy grail of birth control.
But it’s only one approach. Dozens of groups are trying to develop a drug or device with funding from the Male Contraceptive Initiative, a nonprofit that shells out 2 million dollars a year for research. Chief research officer Logan Nickels says this is an exciting time, "but male contraception has been kind of this underfunded scrappy little field for 50 years plus."
Nickels says the long delay may be due to scientific barriers—there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge of male fertility—but also social and cultural ones. "Men have taken a backseat in reproduction, and that’s been partly to their own benefit," he says. "They’ve been able to not have to worry about contraception; they’ve been able to say ‘Oh, my partner deals with that.’"
He says that’s changing, especially after the overturning of Roe vs Wade in 2022, which led to a sharp rise in vasectomies in men under thirty.The Male Contraceptive Initiative estimates that 17 million men are in the market for birth control in the U.S. alone.
Nickels says in the next decade or two, "I think that not only can we bring multiple methods of male contraception to market, we can realize this world where there is more conversation, more discussion, more equity, in reproduction."
Fox, the NEXT Life CEO, sees a desperate need for products like Plan A, which he intends to bring to human clinical trials within the year. "The human right to choose when and if to have a child, is so fundamental, and yet is lacking in every single country, even the most industrialized countries in the world," Fox says.
For him, this issue is personal.
"Coming from foster care myself, seeing the devastating impact of unplanned pregnancies, I chose to get a vasectomy," Fox says. "It’s a burden that I carry every day, knowing that I might not be able to ever have a child because Plan A didn’t exist and wasn’t an option for me."
And there are plenty of signs that Fox isn’t alone in wanting more choices. Though Plan A isn’t yet on the market, 50,000 people have signed up for the interest list.
