Feel-Good Graphene Condom Development

December 2, 2013

Condoms made from graphene are to be developed at The University of Manchester thanks to funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A team from the university received a grant of $100,000 (£62,123) to work on the condom through the Foundation's Grand Challenges Explorations program, which financially supports creative projects to improve the health of people in the developing world.

"If this project is successful, we might have [an everyday] use which will literally touch our everyday life in the most intimate way," said Dr Aravind Vijayaraghavan, who will lead the graphene condom research team, in a statement.

In March of this year the Gates Foundation put out the initial call for "a Next Generation Condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use." One stipulation was that proposals "must work at least as well as the existing condoms." A second call for proposals was put out in September, and the team at Manchester was one of 11 concepts chosen to receive funding.

Graphene is the strongest material known to man, and was isolated for the first time at The University of Manchester in 2004 by Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov. Up until now, it has mainly been used in technology to revolutionise the design of smartphones, ultrafast broadband, drug delivery and making the world's tiniest radio transmitter. The team will use the grant to develop and test a new nano-material containing both graphene and latex that could be used to make a condom.

"We've been working on graphene-based composites for a while. As a material it's quite a common thing to work on -- there's a lot of research going on at Manchester into graphene-based composites, so mixtures of graphenes with different types of polymers," Vijayaraghavan tells Wired.co.uk.

Using graphene to make condoms is an idea that's been talked about in the past, but not necessarily graphene in composite form, and it certainly hasn't been taken seriously as a funding opportunity. "When the Gates call came along in a sense I guess that was very good because maybe you don't necessarily think of putting in a grant with that title as an out-of-the-blue application to the Research Council," said Vijayaraghavan.

Many of the qualities that make latex an ideal material for condoms are also true of graphene, but graphene has the benefit of being extra-strong. Condoms are already very safe, and are still the only of way of simultaneously protecting against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, but the strength added by the graphene is about making condoms more enjoyable to use, not more safe. The hope is that will achieve this by strengthening the latex to allow it to be made thinner.

"If you want a better experience, graphene has got the strength," said Vijayaraghavan. "When you mix graphene in with the polymers to make a composite, it strengthens the composite, so you are taking advantage of the strength of the graphene there and also graphene is a stretchable material as well. It's also very thin."

It's not only the thinness of graphene condoms that might make them more enjoyable to use though: "At the moment we're just targeting the fact that it is going to make a thinner condom, but it also has other properties like, for example, it's a good thermo-conductor so there would be better exchange of body heat for example.

"Graphene has got things like antimicrobial properties, but those are not necessarily targeted in the first round of applications -- those are things we will take advantage of going forward in the future."

In phase one of the grant, which will take a year, the team hopes to develop and test the material, before developing the finishing product in phase two. If phase one is successful, the team can then use its success to apply for phase two funding.

The research will take place through the National Graphene Institute, which is due to open in a new building in Manchester during 2015 and is being jointly funded by the government and the European Research and Development Fund.