Researchers at the University of Dundee have developed a fully automated robotic screening system to rapidly test the effect of drugs and other chemicals on human sperm.
Led by Professor Chris Barratt and Dr Paul Andrews, the research team at Dundee is working towards finding a safe and effective male contraceptive.
Featuring a miniaturised parallel testing system run by a robot, the automated system uses a fast microscope and image-processing tools that precisely track the very fast movement of human sperm, thus allowing the effects of drugs to be accurately measured.
The system was used to rapidly test the efficacy of the ReFRAME collection, one of the world’s largest collections of previously approved and clinically tested drugs.
Around 13,000 drugs were tested to gauge their impact on both the motility (movement) and acrosome reaction (essential for fertilisation) of human sperm.
Dr Andrews, who leads the National Phenotypic Screening Centre in Dundee, said: “The conventional way to test drugs for contraceptive activity is prohibitively time-consuming, but we have managed to develop a disruptive technology platform we hope will be a game changer.
“This new system speeds up the process of drug hunting several thousand-fold. The automated system also uses a different method to examine the effects of drugs on a second critical aspect required for fertilisation, called the acrosome reaction.
“This dual platform now allows for major drug discovery programmes that address the critical gap in the contraceptive portfolio as well as uncover novel human sperm biology.
“By using live human sperm and examining their behaviour, or phenotype, in the presence of drugs and other chemicals, we hope to circumvent the need to second-guess which proteins are important for the cellular processes underlying sperm’s fertilisation capacity.”
The outcome of the study – published in full in journal eLife – shows that it is possible to find effective agents that halt the sperm in its tracks and further work will be done to investigate if any of these are suitable for long term use in the male.
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