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The Birth Control Vaccine
| Article
# : |
14647 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
2,187 Words |
| Author
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Erwin Goldberg
Erwin Goldberg is professor of biochemistry, molecular
biology, and cell biology at Northwestern University in
Evanston, Illinois. |
Vaccination is commonly accepted by people all over the globe as an effective way to prevent disease. Existing vaccines have led to the eradication of a major killer, smallpox, and have diminished the incidence, morbidity, and mortality rate of a large number of infectious diseases, including polio, measles, and diphtheria. Given this wide familiarity with vaccines, it is reasonable to assume that a vaccine, or vaccines, that would be useful in preventing pregnancy might be readily accepted worldwide as a method of family planning.
Research is already well advanced toward developing a vaccine to prevent conception by stimulating the female's immune system to produce antibodies that will prevent effective action of the sperm. Our goal is to produce a vaccine that will require a booster treatment approximately once per year. At this stage we have a precursor to this vaccine that has demonstrated some effectiveness in preventing pregnancy in baboons. The vaccine must now be improved and tested extensively.
In successful tests of a synthetic pregnancy vaccine produced in our laboratory, female baboons did not become pregnant as long as they continued to receive injections of the vaccine, approximately once every two months over a two-year period. When these booster injections were terminated, the animals did become pregnant.
Why did we study baboons? Certainly not for aesthetic reasons. Of the animals available for experimental study, the female baboon's reproductive system is probably most like the human female reproductive system, and at the present state of its development, our vaccine is not ready to test in humans. Nevertheless, if our studies and results with this synthetic vaccine continue on their present trajectory, we can anticipate the availability of a useful contraceptive vaccine within the next five to ten years.
It is essentially the principles of immune system function that underlie development of a contraceptive vaccine. Certain components of the reproductive system, such as hormones or proteins of ova and spermatozoa, can induce an immune response, that is, can act like foreign invaders and alert the body's normal mechanisms of defense. If we could identify, isolate, and purify such antigens, we should be able to make a vaccine of them. We should, in other words, be able to inject females with molecules that would stimulate the production of antibodies to fight the male sperm and thus prevent conception.
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