In a recent study, researchers created a diagnostic test to discover functional sperm in infertile men that would change the treatment of male infertility and assisted reproductive technology.

Male infertility is a recognized issue and deserves scientific and clinical attention.”

Andrei Drabovich, assistant professor of laboratory medicine and pathology on the University of Alberta and corresponding writer of the Molecular & Cellular Proteomics study

One in every six couples attempting to conceive experience infertility issues. In reality, about 10% of men in the US are infertile. Essentially the most common explanation for severe male infertility is a condition often called nonobstructive azoospermia, which ends up in the absence of sperm within the ejaculate as a consequence of poor sperm, or spermatozoa, development.

While assisted reproductive technology has improved exponentially over the past 50 years, in accordance with Drabovich, extracting sperm from men with NOA can take as much as 10 hours within the operating room and has various rates of success.

“Sometimes surgeons can only extract just a few intact spermatozoa during a surgery that takes many hours,” Drabovich said.

That is why he got down to develop a noninvasive method to diagnose NOA and determine if these men contain intact sperm that would fertilize an egg.

“Tests that show the presence or absence of intact spermatozoa in semen may give a very good clue of the whole numbers of spermatozoa within the patient,” Drabovich said. “If there are intact spermatozoa within the ejaculate that could be a green light for urologist and the surgeon to go ahead with the surgery. Nevertheless, it’s an extreme challenge to search out intact spermatozoa in a field of debris.”

Drabovich performed mass spectrometry on semen from men with normal fertility in addition to infertile men with biopsy-confirmed obstructive azoospermia or NOA.

After evaluation, his team identified two proteins, AKAP4 and ASPX, which can be present in intact sperm in men with NOA. They showed that ASPX is situated in the pinnacle of sperm while AKAPA4 is present in the tail using a way called imaging flow cytometry. During imaging flow cytometry, a machine takes images of individual cells. After running these samples, computational algorithms help the researchers mine the hundreds of thousands of images of cell debris and underdeveloped sperm to discover just a few intact sperm cells.

For the reason that roles of AKAP4 and ASPX should not fully understood, Drabovich plans to analyze how they contribute to sperm function.

He also said that his work may result in male contraception drugs in the longer term.

“We would like to see if we will flip the story and take a look at to work on male contraceptives,” Drabovich said. “If we all know the function of the protein, we may give you the option to inhibit it to create a nonhormonal male contraceptive, which is a much desired variety of drug in the intervening time.”