Walgreen (WAG) and CVS Caremark (CVS), the biggest U.S. drugstore chains, hope to generate sales by answering a question few men want to ask: Are they firing blanks? Next month, Walgreen’s 7,800 U.S. stores plan to start selling a fertility test that determines if a man is producing enough sperm to get a woman pregnant. Walgreen and CVS have already started selling the at-home test, SpermCheck Fertility, online.

The blue-and-gold box, which features a smiling couple holding a newborn, will join more than two dozen varieties of female fertility tests in Walgreen stores. SpermCheck’s owner and distributor, closely held ContraVac, is banking on women dropping an extra $40 for the test when they buy ovulation and pregnancy kits for themselves. “In our society, the woman carries the burden of trying to determine the issues surrounding infertility,” says Ray Lopez, ContraVac’s chief executive officer. “Men don’t say, ‘Let me go to the urologist and give a semen sample.’ ”

Every year, about 7.3 million women in the U.S. have trouble getting pregnant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many women, assuming they are to blame, visit gynecologists. Few husbands want to consider that they’re possibly at fault, according to Barbara Collura, executive director of Resolve: the National Infertility Association.

A private-equity investor in Greensboro, N.C., Lopez joined ContraVac as a director in 2004 when he and other investors took a stake in the biotech startup. The majority owner is John Herr, the test’s inventor and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Research in Contraceptive & Reproductive Health. SpermCheck received Food and Drug Administration approval in 2010, almost 30 years after Herr and university colleagues started the research. (Male fertility tests, mostly performed at doctor’s offices, are a potential $440 million-a-year market in the U.S., Lopez says.)

The SpermCheck test requires the man to combine his semen with a solution in a bottle, then place drops of the mixture on a test strip. A reddish line indicates the sperm count is normal—20 million or more per milliliter of semen—while a negative result shows no color. Any reading below normal means men “should consult a physician about a complete fertility evaluation,” according to the test’s instructions.

“There is nothing like it on the shelf,” says Maeve Egner, president of Fusion Marketing, hired by Lopez to help promote SpermCheck. “It’s plugging a gap.” SpermCheck, though, may not become a blockbuster, says Gene Detroyer, a consultant to startups and an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at the European School of Economics’ New York campus. “Unlike pregnancy and ovulation tests that women try once a month, men may use it once,” Detroyer says.

That’s if they bother to test themselves at all. “Men have a greater tendency to believe in their invincibility,” Herr says. “When it comes to reproduction, they are more concerned about the delivery vehicle than they are about what’s delivered.”

The bottom line: A $40 male fertility test goes on sale in Walgreen stores in April. About 7.3 million U.S. women have trouble getting pregnant each year.

Read article from source

By Chris Burritt on March 08, 2012

Even when couples are grappling with infertility, many men balk at getting their sperm count checked. Now, an over-the-counter product enables them to check their count without a trip to the doctor.

SpermCheck Fertility promises to spot potential problems with male fertility in just about 10 minutes, potentially avoiding unneeded visits by women to the gynecologist or obstetrician, according to its owner and distributor, ContraVac Inc., a biotechnology start-up in Charlottesville, Va.

The company says it offers men the same kind of quick test women have access to with pregnancy or ovulation tests. “There’s now some gender equality on the family planning shelf,” said John C. Herr, a University of Virginia cell biology professor who came up with the product’s concept and helped in its development with a team of university staff.

More than seven million couples report having infertility issues every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And about one-third of infertility cases are the result of male issues, with another third female, according to the agency. (The remaining third of infertility cases are caused by a combination of male and female problems or are unknown.)

Family planning products are a $250 million industry, dominated for now by ovulation-prediction and pregnancy-test kits, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market-research firm.

After winning approval from the Food and Drug Administration, ContraVacbegan selling the kits in recent months online, through the websites of drug chains Walgreen Co. WAG -0.12% and CVS Caremark Corp. CVS -0.78% Walgreen plans to sell SpermCheck at its stores for $39.99 starting in mid-April.

ContraVac says the tests are 98% accurate, based on independent tests that were submitted to the FDA. Still, urologists caution that SpermCheck only measures one potential cause of male fertility. Sperm count “is just one of several parameters that’s looked at when we look at male fertility,” said Arthur Tarantino, president of the American Association of Clinical Urologists, adding male infertility could also occur due to the sperm’s movement or shape.

And while SpermCheck was FDA-approved to identify any sperm count lower than 20 million sperm per milliliter, the World Health Organization recently revised its standard, identifying any sperm count lower than 15 million sperm per milliliter as low. Most men, however, are capable of producing up to 300 million sperm per milliliter, so the lowered standard is “statistically extremely small,” Mr. Herr said.

Most semen analysis conducted by doctors costs between $100 and $250, though most health plans cover the test, according to urologists.

SpermCheck works by taking a semen sample and adding a solution that extracts “SP-10″ protein found only in the coating of the sperm’s head. The concentration of the protein is proportional to a man’s sperm level. Within seven minutes, a line appears on the test kit if the sperm level is normal—not unlike a pregnancy test.

ContraVac Chief Executive Ray Lopez expects women—not men—to be the main purchasers of the product at stores. “She’s in there anyway, looking at the pregnancy test, wondering: ‘Hmm, why don’t I spend $40 and see if my man’s got an issue,’ ” Mr. Lopez said.

David Denison, a 30-year-old project manager from Greensboro, N.C., had been reluctant to get tested at a doctor’s office, so he bought SpermCheck online.

Read article from source

By:Timothy W. Martin

Why should women bear the brunt of infertility testing? A new at-home sperm-analysis test allows men to assess their babymaking abilities.

When it comes to infertility, the burden seems to often fall on women. They’re poked and prodded and scoped in an effort to figure out what’s complicating conception.

While it’s just as likely that infertility is related to the male half of the couple, only 20% of men in duos struggling to make a baby get a sperm-count analysis early on or at all, according to data from SpermCheck Fertility, which earlier this month announced the availability of its at-home screening test for men. SpermCheck, which is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, assesses sperm count with 98% accuracy in 10 minutes and does away with the unpleasantness of conjuring up a sperm sample in a doctor’s office. As SpermCheck’s website puts it, a “trip to a fertility clinic for a semen analysis is not for everyone. These tests can be expensive (costing hundreds of dollars and not typically covered by insurance), inconvenient and are often embarrassing.”

Low sperm count, or oligospermia, is a main cause of male infertility. By addressing the issue, SpermCheck will join a crowded infertility market that includes more than 20 types of female-fertility tests in Walgreen stores alone. For women who are having trouble getting pregnant, the test may very well be one they — and not their squeamish partners — snap up along with over-the-counter ovulation kits.

“In our society, the woman carries the burden of trying to determine the issues surrounding infertility,” Ray Lopez, CEO of SpermCheck, told Bloomberg News. “Men don’t say, ‘Let me go to the urologist and give a semen sample.’”

That reluctance has created a $440 million-a-year market for male fertility tests in the U.S., Lopez says.

The test reveals whether sperm count appears normal, at 20 million or more sperm per ml; lower than that indicates a trip to the doctor is pretty much unavoidable. Stores will begin stocking the $39.99 test in April; until then, men — or their partners — can find it online at www.Walgreens.com and www.CVS.com.

It relies on scrutiny of a particular protein found only in the head of mature sperm; the protein was discovered by John Herr, director of the Center of Cell Biology at the University of Virginia and the chairman of SpermCheck. “This at-home test was created to meet the needs of couples who are considering and just planning on starting a family, those currently having trouble conceiving,” says Herr, and “even those men who are just curious about their sperm count.”

Would-be virile men “just curious” about their sperm count? Hard to believe. And yet, assuming fertility aids of some sort successfully pave the way to parenthood, SpermCheck could also prove of some use at the other end of the spectrum: the company also manufactures a do-it-yourself test for postvasectomy screening.

Read article from source

By:Bonnie Rochman

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

There are some simple lifestyle changes that may have a positive impact on your sperm count. To learn more about how to increase sperm count, consider 9 ways to improve your sperm health.

To purchase SpermCheck® Vasectomy, please visit www.spermchecktest.com.