DNA ‘Vaccine’ Sterilizes Mice, Could Lead to One-Shot Birth Control

November 24th, 2015

Mice and cats… *wink*

Via: Science:

Animal birth control could soon be just a shot away: A new injection makes male and female mice infertile by tricking their muscles into producing hormone-blocking antibodies. If the approach works in dogs and cats, researchers say, it could be used to neuter and spay pets and to control reproduction in feral animal populations. A similar approach could one day spur the development of long-term birth control options for humans.

“This looks incredibly promising,” says William Swanson, director of animal research at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Ohio. “We’re all very excited about this approach; that it’s going to be the one that really works.”

Biologist Bruce Hay of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues took a different approach to blocking GnRH. Rather than rely on animals’ immune systems to create antibodies, he and his colleagues engineered a piece of DNA that—when packaged inside inactive virus shells and injected into mice—turned their muscle cells into anti-GnRH antibody factories. Because muscle cells are some of the longest lasting in the body, they continue to churn out the antibodies for 10 or more years. Both male and female mice with high enough levels of the antibodies were rendered completely infertile when Hay’s team allowed them to mate 2 months later, the team reports online today in Current Biology.

“That 2-month delay is because of how long it takes the muscle to start producing enough antibody,” Hay explains. “Going forward, one goal is certainly to try other systems that wouldn’t have that time lag.”

For now, the question is how effective the drug will be in animals other than mice. “The challenge is always moving between species,” says Swanson, who is already planning to test out Hay’s approach in cats. If it works, he says, it could change the way communities deal with feral cat populations. “We have to figure out how to control these populations without being harmful to individual cats,” he says. “And this kind of lifelong contraception might be a safe, effective way to do that.”

Research Credit: tal

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