The Technology
Approximately 15% of couples of reproductive age face fertility issues, with about a third attributed to male factors. Assisted Reproductive Techniques (ART), such as the conventional in vitro fertilization (IVF), and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), are commonly employed to aid conception. However, the selection of the appropriate ART for each patient remains a challenge. Current methods for analyzing sperm functionality rely on parameters correlating to fertilizing ability, but they do not directly measure sperm’s capacity to fuse with oocytes. The existing gold standard, the hamster oocyte penetration test, is impractical, hard to standardize and ethically challenging, and therefore, became obsolete
A novel method has been developed for diagnosing male fertility based on sperm’s ability to induce cell-cell fusion in vitro. Sperm with higher fertilizing ability can fuse with somatic cells expressing the sperm receptor JUNO, leading to the formation of giant multinucleated cells (syncytia). The quantity and size of these syncytia serve as indicators of sperm’s fertilizing potential, aiding embryologists in predicting the success of various ARTs for individual patients.
Advantages
- Utilizes a physiological parameter to determine fertilizing ability.
- Requires standard cell culture conditions available in most clinics. The detection can be easily adapted to the
- available equipment (e.g. microscopes, plate readers and flow cytometers).
- Easily adaptable to different mammalian species by modifying the JUNO sequence.
- Fast, requiring only a few hours and amenable to multi-well plate analysis, enabling simultaneous analysis of multiple samples. Additionally, the analysis can be automated for efficiency.
Applications
- Fertility assessment: help determine suitable ARTs for infertile patients, evaluate sperm donors, and assess potential breeders in livestock.
- Drug discovery: it can be used for screening of drugs that enhance or block sperm fertilizing to be used as (new fertility treatments or new contraceptives, respectively
Business Development Contacts