Frankfurt, Germany – April 7, 2026 — PREVENT (Precision REproductive and contraceptiVE target discovery NeTwork), a new multidisciplinary initiative focused on expanding non-hormonal contraceptive strategies, has officially launched. The program brings together expertise across reproductive biology, chemical biology, structural biology, and medicinal chemistry to identify and validate novel targets involved in fertility. 

Despite significant advances in understanding the biology of fertility, most contraceptive methods continue to rely on hormonal mechanisms. PREVENT aims to address this gap by focusing on specific proteins and pathways that regulate key processes such as sperm motility, energy metabolism, and fertilization signaling, enabling the development of more precise, mechanism-based approaches. 

A central objective of PREVENT is the development of high-quality chemical probes, selective small molecules that enable direct testing of target function in biological systems. These tools will be critical to expand our understanding of non-hormonal contraceptive targets and they will establish the basis for new, effective, and accessible contraceptive options. The initiative integrates a coordinated discovery and validation framework, enabling multiple targets to be explored in parallel through target identification, small-molecule discovery, chemical optimization, and functional testing in relevant biological models. 

“PREVENT is designed to address one of the central challenges in this field, moving from biological insight to validated pharmacological strategies,” said Claudia Tredup, coordinator of PREVENT and Principal Investigator at the SGC-Frankfurt. “By developing selective chemical probes and applying them in relevant biological systems, we can directly test whether specific targets can form the basis of new, non-hormonal contraceptive approaches.” 

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) contributes to PREVENT through its Frankfurt site, supporting target enablement, assay development, and ligand discovery, as well as providing access to advanced screening technologies and open science infrastructure that enable the systematic evaluation of new targets. 

PREVENT is supported by funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. 

About the Structural Genomics Consortium 

The Structural Genomics Consortium is a global public-private partnership that seeks to accelerate drug discovery by fostering collaboration among a large network of scientists in academia and industry and making all research outputs openly available to the scientific community. The current SGC research sites are located at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Karolinska Institute, McGill University, UCL, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University Health Network (UHN) and Unicamp, Brazil.

Learn more about the Women's and Children's Health Initiative at SGC: https://www.thesgc.org/womens-and-childrens-health-initiative