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G one zero. Welcome.

1:16

To Science in Action from the Bbc

1:19

World Service with Me Run and Peas

1:21

and later in the program fighting Infection

1:23

with infection. Will. Back here is

1:26

a really interesting bacteria that lives

1:28

within insects and what we've found

1:30

is that when you put it

1:33

into mosquitoes, it prevents the viruses

1:35

that cause disease to people from

1:38

growing and replicating within the mosquito,

1:40

that and the many testicles grown

1:42

in a lab dish. If we're

1:45

able to generate a test, this in

1:47

a dish and those deaths, this do

1:49

what we want testes to do which

1:51

is to generate a sperm. Maybe the

1:53

future we will be able to generate

1:55

a sperm for people who are unable

1:57

to do so. we start with a

1:59

pounds an animal disease spreading

2:01

across the globe. Not

2:04

H5N1 bird flu this time, now

2:06

seen from the Arctic to the

2:08

Antarctic, though there is still lots

2:11

to say about that. No, this

2:13

is about African Swine Fever, a

2:15

lethal pig virus that, as the

2:18

name suggests, originated in Africa, but

2:21

in the last 20 years have

2:23

swept across Europe and into Asia

2:25

and down to the Pacific. It's

2:27

a highly infectious and lethal disease

2:29

in pigs and has devastated

2:31

herds on farms across the world. A

2:34

short letter in Science this

2:37

week, though, highlights another ecological

2:39

threat, but in the Southeast

2:41

Asian Archipelago, the virus has

2:44

spread back into wild pig

2:46

species, with deadly consequences there

2:48

too. Eric Mayard of

2:50

the Ecological Consultancy Borneo Futures is

2:53

one of the authors. So

2:55

as far as I know, African Swine

2:57

Fever originated in the African wild pig

3:00

species. So there's the bush pig, there's the

3:02

Red River hog and at

3:04

some stage it's spread into pork

3:06

production, spread into

3:09

Ukraine, Russia, then into Europe.

3:11

And there's been various waves back and

3:14

forth of the disease spreading and waning.

3:17

But at some stage it started to go

3:19

into Asia, went into China,

3:21

really affected millions and millions of commercially

3:23

produced pigs that needed to be culled

3:26

and then started to go towards Southeast Asia. And

3:28

that's when I first started to get worried because

3:31

Southeast Asia is kind of the centre of

3:33

wild pig diversity. There's a whole number of

3:36

critically endangered and endangered wild pig species in

3:38

various parts of Southeast Asia. So I thought

3:40

if this deadly disease arrives, it's certainly going

3:42

to be a problem for pigs. I mean,

3:45

that's the thing which I find quite striking

3:47

about what you're writing here is that

3:49

I always have seen this to be a big food,

3:52

agricultural kind of issue. And you're

3:54

talking about this actually being an

3:57

ecological disaster. It is an

3:59

ecological disaster because... because pigs are

4:01

such important components of functioning ecosystems.

4:03

They play a big role in

4:05

seed predation, they muck around in

4:07

the environment, but also of course

4:10

in places like Sumatra, they're

4:12

the key prey species for species like tigers.

4:14

But what comes on top of that we

4:16

came to realize, and I've worked a

4:19

lot with communities on Borneo, depend

4:21

or depend it to a very large

4:23

extent for the protein needs on bearded

4:25

pigs. A big discretis bearded

4:27

pigs to me, I mean, they're an

4:30

important part of the ecosystem. Yeah, the

4:32

males have got very impressive big beards.

4:34

They're really cool species, but it's one

4:36

of the species on Borneo that I

4:39

would consider a cultural keystone species. So

4:41

we often talk about ecological keystone species,

4:43

like species that are playing

4:45

a particular role in particular

4:47

environments. But these are cultural

4:50

keystone species. So they're really important

4:52

for people culturally, like every traditional

4:55

celebration on Borneo, among

4:57

indigenous peoples would normally be accompanied

4:59

by the pig being slaughtered. So

5:01

pigs matter a lot. I

5:04

come from a background of orangutan conservation, but

5:06

I know from long term experience that talking

5:08

to local people about orangutans, they tend to

5:10

fall asleep after five minutes. I

5:12

talk about there the pigs that three days later,

5:15

they're still repeating stories about their

5:17

great grandfather's coming home with a three meter

5:19

long pig and it just goes

5:21

on and on with dances and laughter. It

5:23

takes matter to people in a way that

5:25

a lot of other wildlife may matter a

5:28

lot less. So that makes them interesting. How

5:30

recently did they become infected

5:33

with the virus and how devastating

5:36

has it been? African swine fever kind of

5:38

spread into East Asia around 2018. And

5:42

then we sort of tracked it down the

5:44

Malay Peninsula, it spread into Sumatra, then

5:47

it crossed over to Java and then

5:49

Bali. Borneo was free from the disease

5:51

for quite some time until probably early

5:53

2021 when it

5:56

came in through Malaysian Borneo. And then

5:58

very rapidly, we just saw

6:00

these pigs disappearing everywhere.

6:02

Normally people are doing wildlife

6:05

monitoring with camera checks and what you'd

6:07

normally see is that wild pigs are

6:09

one of the most commonly encountered species

6:12

and they just went to zero pretty

6:14

much overnight. So really high

6:16

mortality rates and that spread

6:18

all over Borneo. I think

6:21

there might be pockets left in the south now

6:23

where the disease hasn't spread but as far as

6:25

we know it's spread pretty much across the entire

6:27

island. I'm flatter gasted.

6:29

I mean is it presumably extraordinarily transmissible?

6:31

How is it getting from animal to

6:33

animal even? Pigs die, the

6:35

carcasses get dumped in the river and

6:38

you get wild pigs feeding on these

6:40

carcasses and get infected and then

6:42

the wild pigs die and all pigs feed

6:44

on the dead wild pigs. So it does

6:46

go really vividly. Are these bearded pigs

6:48

particularly susceptible to it as far as

6:51

you can tell? We know very little

6:53

but it seems that all pig species

6:55

are similarly susceptible whether you take wild

6:57

boar from Europe or you take bear

6:59

that takes from Borneo. The Java warty

7:01

pig which is an endemic species of

7:03

pig on Java, we know nothing. It

7:06

only occurs in the island of Java.

7:08

For all I know they're extinct. We

7:10

know it's recently we jumped to the Philippines

7:13

where there is what is

7:15

called the Visayan warty pig, highly endangered

7:17

species that may even be extinct in

7:19

the wild but there were two zoo

7:21

populations. One zoo population has

7:23

already been wiped out by the disease.

7:25

The other one I haven't had an

7:28

update. So it really comes with super

7:30

high mortality and because you're dealing with

7:32

really rare pig species the big species

7:34

disappear. This is not

7:36

the only example of this that we've

7:38

been talking about. We've been talking about

7:40

the bird flu which again has been

7:42

sort of nurtured and fostered within the

7:44

farming industry and then spread worldwide. This

7:46

sounds like a very similar problem that

7:49

this disease, you know, which was in

7:51

pockets is now everywhere and wiping out

7:53

wild species. It sounds terrible. Well

7:56

the key thing we're asking in our letter

7:58

is why does it get so little attention?

8:00

In the open newspapers

8:02

every day there is a

8:04

new story about bird flu

8:06

affecting polar bears, affecting elephant

8:08

seals, affecting bird populations of

8:11

course. That's pretty common news.

8:14

Well of course our attention. I mean it's

8:16

everything that could be done because you can't

8:18

vaccinate these pigs in the wild. They're

8:20

working on a vaccine and that's primarily

8:22

for commercial poor production vaccinating pigs in

8:24

the wild. You'd have to live bait

8:27

them but I mean you're looking at

8:29

Borneo, it's the third largest island in

8:31

the world and it's pretty inaccessible. I

8:33

don't think that's realistic. What is really

8:35

important and one of the key things

8:37

I'm concerned about is further spread to

8:39

the east, especially the island of New

8:41

Guinea where there's high levels of poverty

8:44

but there's also a high local dependence on wild

8:46

and feral pigs. So we write about it. We

8:48

hope that it doesn't get there. Apparently

8:50

I was just reading it already got

8:52

there. So we may be too late.

8:55

But obviously what these kind of diseases

8:57

require is really strict programs about any

8:59

transportation of potentially infected meat. Really

9:02

lots of checks, lots of warning signs.

9:04

I don't know what can be done in the field.

9:07

We just don't know at the moment.

9:09

So I'm calling on scientists to really

9:11

start looking at this. Ecologist Eric Mayard

9:13

on a virological crisis that no one

9:15

seems to be talking about. Let's

9:17

stick with diseases at the interface

9:20

between humans and nature. But

9:22

this time the other way

9:24

around the viruses we get

9:26

from mosquito bites viruses like

9:28

dengue chikungunya and more recently

9:30

Zika. A little more

9:33

than a decade ago it

9:35

seems like science fiction that those

9:37

infections could be fought with the

9:39

spread of another, an insect infecting

9:42

bacterium called Wolbachia. But

9:44

lab experiments quickly gave way to

9:47

small field trials and then large

9:49

scale deployments in at risk cities

9:52

showing that the approach delivers

9:54

substantial reductions in relevant human

9:56

infections. And this week

9:58

the World Mosquito Program. the Gates

10:00

Foundation backed organization behind the

10:03

approach has started

10:05

work in El Salvador, releasing

10:07

batches of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes into

10:10

three cities there, and

10:12

they're building a new factory in

10:14

Brazil to expand their efforts. Scott

10:17

O'Neill, the visionary behind the effort,

10:20

told me what the bacterium does.

10:22

Wolbachia is a really

10:25

interesting bacteria that lives within

10:27

insects. And what we've found

10:29

is that when you put it into mosquitoes,

10:31

it prevents the viruses that cause

10:34

disease to people from growing

10:37

and replicating within the mosquito that transmits

10:39

them to people. And

10:41

so when you put Wolbachia into

10:43

the mosquito, naturally it stops transmission

10:45

of a whole range of viral

10:48

diseases that currently we

10:50

don't have treatments or cures for.

10:52

And these diseases are infecting many,

10:55

many millions of people, and

10:57

indeed 40% of the world's population is at

11:00

risk in any given year of being

11:02

sick and potentially dying from one of

11:04

these diseases. So the bacteria that lives

11:06

inside the insects are harmlessly effectively, is

11:08

it? Exactly. So the Wolbachia doesn't kill

11:10

the mosquito, although you can use it

11:12

to suppress populations, but that's not what

11:14

we do. But instead the Wolbachia will

11:16

stop the virus growing in the mosquito.

11:18

The virus can't grow in the mosquito,

11:20

it can't be transmitted to people. And

11:22

so we see when we introduce it

11:24

into an area that

11:26

disease drops dramatically. I

11:29

mean, you had some pretty impressive results just at the end

11:31

of last year that proved that it

11:33

is actually an effective process. Yeah.

11:35

So we're working around the world

11:37

in many different countries gathering evidence

11:39

and understanding this novel approach.

11:41

We did a very large randomized controlled

11:44

trial in Indonesia, which was published in

11:46

the New England Journal of Medicine showing

11:48

what we measured,

11:51

a 77% reduction in

11:53

Dangi and 86% reduction in

11:55

hospitalizations in a city in Indonesia where

11:57

Dangi is a huge problem. But

12:00

we've also recently reported on

12:03

work in Colombia, in Latin

12:05

America, where we're measuring even

12:07

greater reductions. And certainly

12:10

even in Australia, where we started the work many

12:13

years ago now, what we've seen

12:15

there is virtually complete elimination of local

12:17

transmission of dengue in Australia. And

12:19

so the impacts look very, very strong. The

12:22

next step here, so you're on the point

12:24

of doing another release in El Salvador, is

12:26

that right? Yeah, that's right.

12:29

We just started in El Salvador last

12:31

weekend with the first mosquito release that

12:33

started there. But is it

12:35

still experimental or is it moving? I'm

12:37

not quite sure what its sort of

12:39

status is as a way of tapping

12:42

these diseases. We consider

12:44

that with the publication of

12:46

the efficacy results in the New England Journal

12:48

of Medicine for us it's proven and now

12:50

it's moved into public health. We're

12:53

just waiting for the World Health Organization

12:55

to essentially endorse it in the

12:57

same way. And to

12:59

provide guidance to countries about adopting the technology.

13:02

But essentially we're past research now. We're

13:05

into really wanting to scale

13:07

up a novel intervention that could have

13:09

a very dramatic impact on public health,

13:11

particularly in developing countries of the world.

13:14

I mean, I was wondering if it's held up by

13:16

the scale of the facilities you have so far, because

13:18

I know that your next step is to open

13:21

a massive factory in Brazil, I think,

13:23

to produce rollback infected mosquitoes that you

13:25

can release. Yeah, so the way this

13:27

works is that we need to grow

13:29

up mosquitoes that have this rollback bacteria

13:31

in them. And

13:34

we grow them and then we release those

13:36

mosquitoes and they mate with the wild mosquitoes

13:38

and pass the rollback here into the wild

13:41

mosquito population where it establishes. So

13:43

there's a process that we have to grow

13:45

mosquitoes and release them. And that's

13:47

a bit of a bottleneck traditionally in

13:49

being able to do deployments to have

13:51

enough mosquitoes to release. And

13:53

so a large focus for us is

13:55

on this issue of manufacturing and scale

13:57

up of manufacturing and, you know,

14:00

that end we're working in locations such

14:02

as Brazil in wanting to develop next

14:04

generation mass rearing of mosquitoes for deployments.

14:06

The Wolbachia itself, do you brew that

14:09

up in big vats? It's

14:11

a bit of a misconception that some people

14:13

think do you have to inject all these

14:15

mosquitoes before back here before you release them

14:17

and so no we don't we only had

14:19

to do that injection and transfer the Wolbachia

14:22

in once and it was really difficult to

14:24

do you know we had to micro inject

14:26

it into mosquito bags but once we have

14:28

established it you know it gets passed

14:30

from mother to baby mosquitoes through

14:32

the eggs and so once we've

14:34

got it in once we can

14:36

maintain it as a colony of

14:38

mosquitoes and then we release those

14:40

mosquitoes that we grow. And when

14:43

they go out do you just have

14:45

to infect an area once and the

14:47

bacterium just keeps on cycling

14:49

through the generations or do you have

14:51

to keep reinfecting areas with this bacteria?

14:53

So this is a really cool aspect of

14:55

the technology and that you only have to do it

14:57

once. So you know we

14:59

did our first work in Australia many

15:02

years ago now in 2011 at Blue

15:04

Doors where we released mosquitoes into areas

15:06

around the city of Cairns in northern

15:09

Australia and we did that

15:11

over a 10-week period and now it's like

15:13

13 years later and we've

15:15

not had to re-release any mosquitoes. It was a

15:18

10-week intervention and now there's

15:20

no dengue in the part of Australia

15:22

or actually all of Australia now that

15:24

we've treated and that's ongoing and that

15:26

sustains itself and so really the

15:28

key here from a public health perspective is

15:31

you only have to deploy it once. You

15:33

don't have to redeploy it every year like

15:35

giving vaccines to babies or the Australian sector

15:38

flies every time there's an outbreak. You

15:40

only have to do it once, it's

15:42

incredibly cost-effective and indeed you know the

15:45

analysis that's been done suggests that it

15:47

will save governments money to put the

15:49

deployment in place when

15:51

you consider the cost of treating dengue

15:53

in both trying to prevent its transmission

15:55

but also treating sick people in hospitals.

16:00

that is not that they

16:02

could be killers but that they can

16:04

be absolutely debilitating to people so they

16:06

just ruin people's lives. Yeah

16:08

that's right so the headline

16:10

mortality figures may not be

16:13

as dramatic as the same disease like malaria

16:16

but it's the social and economic

16:18

cost of these diseases and you

16:21

know when COVID came through everybody

16:23

was extremely alarmed that the

16:25

rush on hospital and health services

16:27

might collapse the hospital system and

16:30

I don't know if you remember you know they

16:32

were bringing military hospital ships to

16:34

New York and in China they were

16:36

building a hospital in a weekend that

16:39

didn't end up occurring but it

16:41

really highlighted the fragility of our health

16:43

system and how big outbreak can really

16:45

challenge us and so that was

16:47

COVID. Denny does

16:49

the same thing and has been doing

16:52

it for years and years you know

16:54

it almost collapses health systems when you

16:56

have big outbreaks it's just that it's

16:58

happening in tropical countries and doesn't get

17:00

the attention that's like COVID has ripping

17:02

through the developed world. Yeah you know

17:04

these diseases are a

17:06

huge break on the

17:08

economy there are huge

17:10

problems for families and

17:13

children are not in school there's a

17:15

problem with people being able to earn

17:17

money to support their families it's

17:20

just the whole situation is

17:22

very dire and getting worse you

17:24

know it's not getting better it's getting worse. You

17:27

say that you've released some of these

17:29

populations many years ago have you

17:31

seen any kind of

17:34

ecological problem that follows?

17:37

So we've been very interested in that question and

17:40

I think everybody is you know

17:42

with this novel type of intervention

17:44

are there any negative consequences are

17:47

there any unintended consequences and so

17:49

we've been looking very hard at

17:51

both from places where we first

17:53

deployed you know over a decade ago in Australia

17:55

to places where we're working now and interestingly

17:58

we don't see any. consequences

18:00

from what we're doing. We different

18:54

expense. Next.

19:03

With male infertility accounting for a

19:05

half of all cases of couples

19:08

failing to conceive, there

19:10

is a huge need to understand what

19:12

can go wrong in sperm production. But

19:15

clearly that's incredibly hard to study

19:18

in actual life patients. Hence,

19:20

the desire to cultivate realistic tissue cultures

19:22

in a lab to probe what happens

19:25

when sperm are made correctly and what

19:27

goes wrong when they aren't. Mitzan

19:30

Gonen of Bar-Ilan University is a

19:32

specialist in sex determination, how genes

19:34

encode for the differentiation between male

19:37

and female, and the

19:39

interplay between genes, hormones and

19:41

physiology. The testis

19:43

organoids she has generated from mouse

19:45

tissues are, she says, a demonstration

19:48

in the incredible advances made

19:50

recently in experimental biology. Organoids

19:54

is basically a mini-organ and this is

19:56

a field that has developed in

19:58

the last decade or so. So where

20:00

we understand that we cannot

20:02

really culture cells in

20:05

a 2D plastic dish and

20:08

expect them to behave like they behave in the body.

20:11

So many types of organoids

20:14

have been developed where

20:16

it's kind of a

20:18

miniature tissue that behaves

20:21

very similar to the real tissue in the

20:24

body. So gut organoids have been developed and

20:26

brain organoids, it's like mini brain in a

20:28

dish. And kidney organoids,

20:31

but testis organoids have not been developed

20:34

in a way that is really good

20:36

and really similar to the real testis.

20:39

That's what you've managed to do on this

20:41

occasion. Is this a very tiny sort of

20:43

sample as it were? It is

20:46

very tiny, yes. I

20:48

mean you can see it in the eye but you won't

20:50

see very much details in the eye. You have to look

20:52

under a microscope. You can

20:54

see structures. So in the real

20:56

testis, the testis is filled with

20:59

tubules and within those tubules

21:01

this is where the sperm is being produced.

21:04

And we have managed to generate those

21:06

tubules within our mini testis

21:08

in a dish. But you actually

21:10

keep them alive for nine weeks? Yes, and

21:13

actually nine weeks is quite a long

21:15

time because basically what we would want

21:17

from a testis is that they will

21:19

function like a testis. The main tool

21:21

function of a testis is to produce

21:24

sperm and to

21:26

generate hormones, the androgens or the

21:28

testosterone secreted in males. So

21:31

if we are talking about generating

21:34

sperm in mice, this process of

21:36

spermatogenesis like we call it takes

21:38

34 days. So

21:41

the fact that we can keep those

21:43

miniature testis for nine weeks

21:45

makes it theoretically possible to

21:47

start and complete the entire

21:50

process of sperm production. We

21:53

still don't know for sure whether we

21:55

really manage to generate functional sperm. We

21:58

see real signs or... like initial

22:00

signs of entry into

22:02

what we call meiosis. This is

22:05

the process by which you start

22:07

to generate sperm, because

22:10

when you generate a sperm, you want

22:12

to cut the DNA by half, so

22:15

the other half will eventually come from

22:17

the egg upon fertilization. So

22:19

we see all kinds of genes

22:22

that are only expressed at meiosis,

22:24

and we see them at the

22:26

protein level within our organoids, suggesting

22:28

that the organoids can

22:30

really enter meiosis. But that

22:33

was another question I've had. Are these

22:35

immature testes that you're producing organoids, or

22:37

are they mature? And

22:39

it sounds like they've gone into that sort

22:41

of hormonal stages and everything. So they've gone

22:44

through a whole layers

22:46

of development. So this is an

22:48

excellent question what you just raised, because

22:50

the issue with organoids is that they

22:52

usually tend to be very similar to

22:54

the embryonic or the immature state of

22:56

the organ, and not so much to

22:59

the mature. And

23:01

after we developed these testes organoids

23:03

from neonates or from pups of

23:05

mouse, we also wanted to

23:07

check whether we can do that from

23:09

embryonic testes and also from adult testes.

23:12

So what we saw is that when we

23:15

do that from embryonic testes, we're getting organoids

23:17

that are much nicer than the

23:19

neonatal ones. We are getting

23:21

amazing cubules. I don't even need to take

23:23

you to the microscope to see the cubules.

23:25

You can see them immediately, and they are

23:27

amazing. But on the contrary,

23:29

when we try to take testes samples

23:32

from adult testes from mice that are

23:34

three months old, and we

23:36

try to generate those organoids, they are not able

23:38

to do so. I presume that

23:41

your main interest in this is

23:43

how fertility is controlled in males.

23:45

So there are several interests. The

23:48

first of them is infertility. Currently,

23:51

infertility is a really common

23:53

condition. One in six people

23:55

worldwide will suffer from infertility.

23:58

And the situation is that... in 50%

24:00

of the cases it stems from male

24:03

infertility. Sometimes people tend to think about

24:05

infertility as always it's female infertility but

24:07

no in 50% of the cases

24:09

it's the male. We know very

24:12

little of why is it being

24:14

caused and in order

24:16

to understand why we need to have

24:18

a good model to study that. So

24:20

the idea is that we would want

24:22

to generate a miniature testis. We first

24:25

generated it for mice but we are

24:27

now planning to shift to do that

24:29

with human samples and yes

24:31

the idea is first of all to study

24:33

infertility but my initial research

24:35

interest is coming from sex determination. This

24:37

is a main topic that we study

24:39

in the lab and

24:42

we also work on cases of

24:44

patients that are what we call

24:46

sex-reversed. Its official name

24:48

is disorder of sex development or

24:50

DSD. Those are patients

24:53

that are initially they were

24:55

XY they should have been males

24:57

but they are born as females or

24:59

vice versa you have someone that is XX

25:01

and born as a male and

25:04

we are really interested in understanding

25:06

the process of sex determination so

25:08

again having a testis in a

25:10

dish can allow us to study

25:12

things that are related to sex

25:14

determination and lastly I

25:16

think this is probably the most interesting for most

25:19

people to hear is that if

25:21

we are able to generate a testis in

25:23

a dish and those testis do what we

25:25

want testis to do which is to generate

25:28

sperm maybe in the future we

25:30

will be able to generate a sperm for

25:32

people who are unable to do so. Absolutely

25:35

I mean it seems to me two

25:37

options there would be either to produce

25:39

them in a dish or to make

25:41

some kind of transplant. So in

25:43

order to produce a sperm in

25:45

a dish for someone that is

25:47

infertile we need to shift all

25:49

of that system to be working

25:51

with stem cells so the vision

25:53

is to be able to take

25:55

a skin cell from an infertile

25:58

patient to transform this How

26:00

to become induced Pluripotent stem cell

26:02

or I fear cells And then

26:05

you can take these ip a

26:07

sales and differentiated in the lab

26:09

into two types of cells. one

26:11

a germ cells with large says

26:13

that can give rise to sperm

26:16

and all sites and the other

26:18

thing that we are generating geeze

26:20

to differentiate those idea says into

26:22

them so mighty Course support cells

26:24

within the testes and then mix

26:26

them together to generate stem cells

26:29

derived from the patient. Artificial Testes

26:31

Any for can generate in that

26:33

setting that a patient specific artificial

26:36

testes and generate with any sperm

26:38

we can take that and injected

26:40

to his wife or site and

26:42

generate a biological child. something that

26:45

is completely impossible to day for

26:47

for sort out. They said they

26:49

can adopt or they can take

26:51

a sperm donation but they will

26:54

never have a biological times. The.

26:56

Mirthless organ or teammates sausage with mouth

26:58

such as materials. You probably can't do

27:00

that very easily with people, but you

27:02

think you can do it with stem

27:05

cells? to model

27:07

infertility have a specific individual or

27:09

generate a sperm for specific individual

27:11

yes the aim is to do

27:13

that with stem cells bass in

27:15

relation to a question we also

27:17

have plans to do that with

27:19

human samples and i want to

27:22

raise another issue so you probably

27:24

know that sperm production only starts

27:26

at puberty so if you have

27:28

a child that these five or

27:30

six or ten years old he

27:32

he didn't produce yeah spoon and

27:34

the situation is that when kids

27:36

get cancer and they need to

27:38

start to get chemotherapy or any

27:40

type of anti anti cancer drugs

27:42

in many cases they will lose

27:45

their fertility and we don't have

27:47

an answer of how to help

27:49

them with us so currently what

27:51

is happening with those kids is

27:53

that before they would start day

27:55

the cancer treatment or anti cancer

27:57

treatment they will be am going

27:59

through simple procedure and

28:02

where a small testis biopsy

28:04

will be taken and

28:06

basically this sample is being kind of

28:08

sliced in the lab and being frozen

28:10

with the hope that one day scientists

28:13

will manage to develop artificial

28:16

testis or some kind of a structure

28:18

that will enable them to generate a

28:20

test sperm in a dish. So

28:23

what we are going to do is that

28:25

we are going to take those samples we

28:27

have already a collaboration and so we're going

28:29

to try to take those samples and

28:31

we are going to try to

28:33

generate human testis organoids using those

28:35

samples and see whether the

28:38

same conditions that we developed from the mouth

28:40

for the mouse will work also for human

28:42

patients. I find it so thrilling that

28:44

the program for all of this stuff is

28:46

locked away in the genome and it's a

28:48

question of being able to unlock it in

28:50

the right way each time and give it

28:52

the right kinds of external conditions. The

28:55

entire field of regenerative medicine is quite

28:57

remarkable and I mean the cells

28:59

know what they need to do you just need to enable

29:01

them to be in the right environment and they will do

29:03

what they know to do best. Nitsun

29:05

Gohn and her experiments and ambitions

29:08

are described in the International Journal

29:10

of Biology. Let's hope they open

29:12

up all kinds of possibilities but

29:14

that is it for Science in

29:16

Action from the BBC World Service

29:18

for this week and from me

29:20

Ron P's and producer Alison Nitskim

29:22

Southwell. Next week the

29:24

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