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."