(Press-News.org) AUDIO:
This is an audio clip of Deborah Sweet of Cell Stem Cell interviewing Dr. Kyle Orwig of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine regarding his recent preclinical study "Spermatogonial...
Click here for more information.
A promising stem-cell-based approach for treating infertility has been successfully demonstrated in non-human primates, as reported in a study published by Cell Press in the November issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell. The preclinical study represents an important milestone for translating this strategy to the clinic, particularly for cancer survivors who have been rendered infertile by chemotherapy they received before reaching sexual maturity.
"This is the first study to demonstrate that transplanted spermatogonial stem cells can produce functional sperm in higher primates," says senior study author Kyle Orwig of the University of Pittsburgh and Magee-Womens Research Institute. "This is an important step toward human translation."
Cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy or chemotherapy often become infertile because these treatments damage dividing cells, including not only cancer cells but also spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs)—stem cells that develop into sperm. Prior to cancer therapy, adult men can cryopreserve their sperm and later use these cells to father children. But prepubertal boys don't have this option because they have not yet produced any mature sperm, so cancer treatments can leave them permanently infertile.
One promising strategy for these young patients is to preserve their SSCs before they undergo cancer therapy and later transplant these cells after they finish cancer treatment and reach sexual maturity. This approach has worked in a range of animal models, but past studies in large animals have primarily used radiation therapy to cause infertility, even though chemotherapy is also a common source of infertility in cancer patients.
In the new study, Orwig and his team cryopreserved SSCs from monkeys before treating them with a commonly used chemotherapy drug. After treatment, they injected the SSCs into the testes of these animals and found that the cells produced sperm in the majority of transplant recipients. Moreover, the SSC-derived sperm of one animal was capable of fertilizing egg cells and producing embryos that developed normally.
As noted in the accompanying In Translation article by Pierre Fouchet and colleagues, this work "constitutes a milestone in the field of reproduction, and generates hope for restoring fertility in survivors of childhood cancer."
VIDEO:
This movie shows guidance and positioning of the echo-dense (white) injection needle into the echo-dense rete testis space and subsequent injection of the donor cell suspension using positive pressure. The...
Click here for more information.
###
Hermann et al.: "Spermatogonial stem cell transplantation into Rhesus testes regenerates spermatogenesis producing functional sperm."
Firlej et al.: "Stem Cell Therapy for Male Infertility Takes a Step Forward
Stem cells show promise for treating infertility in cancer patients
2012-11-01
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Meth vaccine shows promising results in early tests
2012-11-01
LA JOLLA, CA – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have performed successful tests of an experimental methamphetamine vaccine on rats. Vaccinated animals that received the drug were largely protected from typical signs of meth intoxication. If the vaccine proves effective in humans too, it could become the first specific treatment for meth addiction, which is estimated to affect 25 million people worldwide.
"This is an early-stage study, but its results are comparable to those for other drug vaccines that have then gone to clinical trials," said Michael ...
Predicting what topics will trend on Twitter
2012-11-01
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Twitter's home page features a regularly updated list of topics that are "trending," meaning that tweets about them have suddenly exploded in volume. A position on the list is highly coveted as a source of free publicity, but the selection of topics is automatic, based on a proprietary algorithm that factors in both the number of tweets and recent increases in that number.
At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT in November, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student, Stanislav Nikolov, will present ...
Plants recognise pathogenic and beneficial microorganisms
2012-11-01
Plant roots are surrounded by thousands of bacteria and fungi living in the soil and on the root surface. To survive in this diverse environment, plants employ sophisticated detection systems to distinguish pathogenic microorganisms from beneficial microorganisms.
Here the so-called chitin molecules from microorganisms, along with modified versions, play an important role as they are detected by the plant surveillance system. Legumes, for example, build a defence against pathogenic microorganisms in response to simple chitin molecules.
However, when the plant detects ...
Great differences between EU Member States in how well transport systems cope with weather phenomena
2012-11-01
This is the first study in the world to evaluate the risks posed to transport by weather phenomena on a country-specific and mode-specific basis. Among the EU Member States, Poland has the highest risk level indicator. The highest-risk regions are in the countries of Eastern Europe and in mountainous areas. Low-risk countries include Ireland, Austria, Luxembourg and the Nordic countries.
The risk-level evaluation was conducted using a risk indicator designed by VTT scientists. The calculations were performed on substantial datasets and involved estimating the ...
Gen X overtaking baby boomers on obesity
2012-11-01
New research from the University of Adelaide shows that Australia's Generation X is already on the path to becoming more obese than their baby boomer predecessors.
Studies show that boomers currently have the highest level of obesity of any age group in Australia. However, new research by University of Adelaide PhD student Rhiannon Pilkington has revealed some alarming statistics. As part of her research, she has compared obesity levels between the two generations at equivalent ages.
Using data from the National Health Survey, Ms Pilkington compared Generation X in ...
UK butterfly populations threatened by extreme drought and landscape fragmentation
2012-11-01
A new study has found that the sensitivity and recovery of UK butterfly populations to extreme drought is affected by the overall area and degree of fragmentation of key habitat types in the landscape.
The analysis, published this week in the scientific journal Ecography, used data on the Ringlet butterfly collected from 79 UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme sites between 1990 and 1999, a period which spanned a severe drought event in 1995.
The study was led by Dr Tom Oliver from the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in collaboration with colleagues from CEH and ...
Inflammation and cognition in schizophrenia
2012-11-01
Philadelphia, PA, November 1, 2012 – There are a growing number of clues that immune and inflammatory mechanisms are important for the biology of schizophrenia. In a new study in Biological Psychiatry, Dr. Mar Fatjó-Vilas and colleagues explored the impact of the interleukin-1β gene (IL1β) on brain function alterations associated with schizophrenia.
Fatjó-Vilas said that "this study is a contribution to the relatively new field of 'functional imaging genetics' which appears to be potentially powerful for the study of schizophrenia, where genetic factors are ...
Bulletin: German nuclear exit delivers economic, environmental benefits
2012-11-01
Following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, the German government took the nation's eight oldest reactors offline immediately and passed legislation that will close the last nuclear power plant by 2022. This nuclear phase-out had overwhelming political support in Germany. Elsewhere, many saw it as "panic politics," and the online business magazine Forbes.com went as far as to ask, in a headline, whether the decision was "Insane -- or Just Plain Stupid."
But a special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, ...
Sleep problems cost billions
2012-11-01
If you can't sleep at night, you're not alone. Around ten per cent of the population suffer from insomnia, where you have trouble falling asleep, wake up frequently at night, and still feel tired when the morning comes.
– When you feel tired and indisposed, your performance at work suffers, says Børge Sivertsen, professor at UiB's Department of Clinical Psychology and senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
Sleep apnoea is a more severe problem, affecting four to five per cent of the population. Sufferers can stop breathing for up to 40 seconds ...
Nereidum Montes helps unlock Mars' glacial past
2012-11-01
On 6 June, the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA's Mars Express revisited the Argyre basin as featured in our October release, but this time aiming at Nereidum Montes, some 380 km northeast of Hooke crater.
The stunning rugged terrain of Nereidum Montes marks the far northern extent of Argyre, one of the largest impact basins on Mars.
Nereidum Montes stretches almost 1150 km and was named by the noted Greek astronomer Eugène Michel Antoniadi (1870).
Based on his extensive observations of Mars, Antoniadi famously concluded that the 'canals' on Mars reported by Percival ...