Open science accelerates women’s health innovation globally
SGC-UNC, with support from the Gates Foundation, is working on developing a nonhormonal contraceptive.
An open science initiative led by the UNC Structural Genomics Consortium, within the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, is helping accelerate the discovery of next-generation, nonhormonal contraceptives.
This work is funded by the Gates Foundation, as part of a larger commitment to accelerate research and development for women’s health innovations.
“Pregnancy is one of the major drivers of poverty in many of these countries,” said Tim Willson, Harold Kohn Distinguished Professor in Open Science Drug Discovery and chief scientist for SGC-UNC. “Giving women more control over when they conceive is a key area to make a real impact.”
Within this broader effort, SGC plays a central role in the Gates Foundation’s Contraceptive Drug Accelerator, a global network of academic labs working to identify and validate new drug targets for nonhormonal contraception. At Carolina, Willson’s team is focused on phosphoglycerate kinase 2, a sperm-specific glycolytic enzyme critical for energy production and sperm motility.
“What makes PGK2 so interesting is that it’s almost exclusively expressed in sperm cells,” Willson explained. “We suspect that if you can selectively inhibit this enzyme, the sperm can’t generate the energy they need to function.”
The idea is that a woman could take a nonhormonal pill that reaches sufficient concentrations in the reproductive tract to temporarily inhibit PGK2 in sperm. Without the ability to generate adenosine triphosphate — the energy source sperm need to swim — the sperm would be unable to reach or fertilize the egg. Because PGK2 is almost exclusively found in sperm cells, targeting it could avoid many of the systemic side effects associated with hormonal contraceptives.
“That specificity is the goal,” Willson said. “We’re trying to shut down sperm function without interfering with the hormonal cycles that regulate women’s health.”
True to the SGC’s open science philosophy, all aspects of the project, from chemistry to biology to data sharing, are conducted openly, with no intellectual property restrictions. An international team of chemists and biologists at Carolina, Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine in Bangalore, India, meet weekly to share data, compounds and ideas in real time.
“That’s where you really see open science at work,” Willson said. “Every compound we make and every dataset we generate is shared immediately, which allows us to move incredibly fast.”
Since launching the effort in May 2025, the team has already developed a set of five highly selective probe compounds, which is an unusually rapid timeline in early-stage drug discovery. These probes are now being distributed across the Gates Foundations CoDA network for biological testing in models of sperm function.
“At the end of the day, the more we understand about human biology, the better drugs we can make,” Willson said. “Open science removes barriers and lets the best ideas rise to the top.”
If successful, the work could help lay the foundation for a new contraceptive option, while offering a powerful example for how open, global collaboration can accelerate drug discovery.
