Monthly Contraceptive Pill Shows Promise in Pig Study

A device that releases synthetic hormones slowly over time could one day provide a more practical alternative to daily birth control pills, say scientists.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Researchers at MIT have developed an oral contraceptive pill that releases hormones slowly into the stomach with the goal of developing a product that only needs to be taken on a once-a-month basis. A trial of the device in pigs, described yesterday (December 4) in Science Translational Medicine, indicates that the technology is as good as the daily birth control pill at maintaining high levels of contraceptive hormones in the blood.

“The concept of a monthly oral contraceptive pill is attractive and has the potential to broaden contraceptive choice,” Diana Mansour, vice president of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare in the UK, tells the BBC. “However, the development of such a novel contraceptive is still in its early stages. We look forward to further research in this area.”

While the oral contraceptive pill is up to 99 percent effective for women who take one ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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