Celia Santi, MD, Ph.D., recently received a two-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The $435,000 award, beginning November 2022, will support her lab’s efforts in screening and characterizing a new class of female-controlled non-hormonal contraceptive agents using in vitro and in vivo assays. Dr. Santi’s research project is titled, “SLO3 inhibitors: a new class of non-hormonal female contraceptives.”
In collaboration with Drs. Denton and Lindsley from Vanderbilt University, we developed blockers of a sperm specific potassium channel (SLO3) that might act as effective non-hormonal female contraceptives by interfering with sperm function in the female reproductive tract. In this new grant from the Gates Foundation we will test the in vivo contraceptive efficacy of these drugs in a mouse model.”
Dr. Santi