Washington D.C., Dec 1, 2009 / 16:15 pm
A leading contraceptive researcher has abandoned her attempts to create a vaccine that would render a woman “immune” from pregnancy. The Population Research Institute lauded the end of the research, which it said tried to make a woman’s body treat pregnancy as a disease.
Based on research into women who are infertile because of antibodies that inhibit sperm from fertilizing the egg, Dr. Donnie Dunbar had hoped to develop a vaccine that would trick a healthy woman’s immune system into a hostile reaction to her own eggs. She intended the vaccine to help combat what she saw as the “world population problem.”
Tests which injected rabbits with pig proteins caused an autoimmune response, but it completely destroyed the ovaries.
“Unfortunately, we weren’t just looking at preventing fertilization now; we generated a complete autoimmune disease, which is also known as premature ovarian failure,” Dunbar said, according to the Population Research Institute.