Letter from the Directors

Kelly Mayo

Teresa Woodruff

We live in a world of complex and confounding issues that impact on the ultimate goal of any species, which is to reproduce itself.  World population stands at 6 billion people and is growing at an astounding rate, making contraception a critical economic, social and personal issue.  Yet for the millions of couples facing infertility, progress in new areas such as assisted reproductive technology are key to their goal of conception and delivery of a healthy infant.  Intertwined with these scientific issues are the important moral and ethical questions that accompany many significant technological advances.

At the center of these issues is basic biological research in the reproductive sciences and associated medical advances leading to the therapeutic application of these research advances.  Understanding the biology of reproduction is expected to guide future medical treatments for infertility, pregnancy-related disorders, diseases of the reproductive tract, and gynecological cancers.  It has important ties to women's health in areas such as menopause, breast cancer and hormone replacement therapy. Basic research in the reproductive sciences has led, and will continue to facilitate, the development of novel contraceptives and enhanced assisted reproductive technologies.

Reproductive science is a broad discipline concerned with the mechanisms and regulation of reproductive processes and the diagnosis and treatment of reproductive disorders.  It extends from basic research investigations into the molecular and physiological processes that occur in living cells and organisms, through applied studies relevant to efficient animal husbandry, and into clinical practices that directly impact human health with respect to fertility and infertility. The field is inherently multi-disciplinary, and CRS therefore provides a forum from bringing together investigators with diverse individual interests in a way that capitalizes on creating and fostering interactions leading to innovative basic and clinical research.

To provide a sense of the depth and breadth of ongoing research in CRS laboratories, several examples of recent basic and clinical discoveries are highlighted below.  In most cases, these projects have involved active research collaborations between several CRS investigators.

• Professor Andrea Dunaif (Medicine) has demonstrated that women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, a leading cause of infertility, have cellular resistance to the actions of insulin.  Dr. Dunaif was recently awarded an NIH center grant to continue these studies, which include collaborative experiments in animal models with Professor Jon Levine (Neurobiology & Physiology).


• Professors Fred Turek and Terry Horton (Neurobiology and Physiology) have uncovered a mechanism by which the light-dark cycle modulates the endocrine responsiveness of female hamsters to a male. This mechanism involves the circadian hormone melatonin, and the studies have general implications for understanding the relationship between environmental cues and reproduction in mammalian species.


• Professors Lonnie Shea (Chemical Engineering), Teresa Woodruff (Neurobiology & Physiology) and Ralph Kazer and John Zhang (Obstetrics & Gynecology) have teamed up to develop novel ways of growing ovarian follicles, the structure that includes the female egg, in culture, using defined artificial biodegradable scaffolds. These investigators have recently received an NIH center grant to continue these experiments, which have practical implications for a variety of assisted reproduction technologies.


• Professors J. Larry Jameson and Jeffrey Weiss (Medicine) have identified mutations in the proteins SF-1 and Dax-1 that are associated with sex-reversal syndromes or ambiguous sexual development, and have shown that these two proteins act as functional antagonists important for differentiation of the bipotential gonad during early development.  They have been awarded a new NIH center grant to perform genetic screens for novel mutations impacting sex dtermination.


• Professors Ted Jardetzky (Biochemistry, Molecular Biology & Cell Biology) and Teresa Woodruff (Neurobiology & Physiology) have established the structure of a complex between the reproductive hormone activin and its receptor protein. This will provide knowledge about how the receptor is activated by its hormone, and has implications for the design of therapeutic drugs that might target this receptor to activate it or block its activity.


• Professor Chung Lee (Urology) has found that a mutant form of the TGF-beta receptor, when introduced into a mouse model of metastatic prostate cancer, can limit tumor growth.  This receptor belongs to the same family as the activin receptor that was structurally characterized by Professors Jardetzky and Woodruff, and the work has clear implications for prostate cancer therapies.


• Professor Erv Goldberg (Biochemistry, Molecular Biology & Cell Biology) has used a testis-specific form of a common glycolytic enzyme to immunize female nonhuman primates, and has demonstrated that the resultant antibodies reduce sperm binding to the egg and suppress fertility.  Such immunological approaches hold great promise as long-term contraceptive agents in limiting population growth.