Chemotherapy treatment is a mainstay of anticancer regimens, significantly contributing to the recent increase in childhood cancer survival rates. Conventional cancer therapy targets not only malignant but also healthy cells resulting in side effects including infertility. For prepubertal boys, there are currently no fertility preservation strategies in use, although several potential methods are under investigation. Most of the current knowledge in relation to prepubertal gonadotoxicity has been deduced from adult studies; however, the prepubertal testis is relatively quiescent in comparison to the adult. This review provides an overview of research to date in humans and animals describing chemotherapy-induced prepubertal gonadotoxicity, focusing on direct gonadal damage. The chemotherapy agents investigated so far target the germ cell population activating apoptotic pathways and may also impair Sertoli cell function. Due to use of combined chemotherapy agents for patients, the impact of individual drugs is hard to define, however, use of in vivo and in vitro animal models can overcome this problem. Furthering our understanding of how chemotherapy agents target the prepubertal testis will provide clarity to patients on the gonadotoxicity of different drugs and aid in the development of cytoprotective agents. This marked advance, due in large part to improved chemotherapy treatments, has led to a growing population of long-term childhood cancer survivors.
Introduction
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The objective of this study was to assess the reproductive response of adult and prepubertal goats subjected to repeated laparoscopic ovum pick-up LOPU. Both groups underwent six LOPU procedures at seven-day intervals and were subsequently subjected to controlled mating and pregnancy diagnosis to evaluate their future fertility. The study showed a reduction in the number of follicles visualized and in the amount and quality of the oocytes that were recovered and exposed to in vitro maturation. As indicated by the fertility test, however, no complications were found during the laparoscopic procedures that would impair the reproductive future of the animals. Therefore, a viable number of oocytes were obtained even with the decreased reproductive efficiency, proving that repeated LOPUs do not interfere with the reproductive of adult and prepubertal nanny goats.
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Try out PMC Labs and tell us what you think. Learn More. This study investigates the effects of the endocrine milieu of immunodeficient mouse host intact vs. Previous marmoset xenografting studies used castrated nude mouse hosts which did not support efficient graft survival and maturation. Due to the distinct endocrine milieu in marmosets with a deletion of exon 10 in the LH receptor, we wanted to explore whether the most efficient xenograft development occurs in intact male mouse hosts compared to intact females or castrated males.
Testicular tissue transplantation in humans was already performed back in by Brown-Sequard to treat hypogonadism. However, grafting the tissue to restore the reproductive potential has never been reported. Efforts to preserve the fertility of prepubertal boys facing fertility-threatening therapies by cryopreserving their immature testicular tissue have motivated researchers to develop methods to give these young patients a hope to father their own genetic child. In this regard, auto-transplantation of cryostored tissue can be considered if there is no risk of cancer cell contamination of the tissue i.