Male infertility can be devastating for men and their partners. Despite that, an underlying cause of infertility cannot be identified in about half of infertile men. Now researchers have received a 2.1 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Ìð¹ÏÊÓƵ for the Genetics of Male Infertility Initiative (GEMINI), a five-year project aimed at discovering the genetic causes of infertility, and looking at how best to address them in a clinical setting through personalized genomic medicine. The GEMINI team will be specifically studying men who suffer from azoospermia, a condition in which no sperm are produced.
Kenneth Aston, PhD, assistant professor of surgery at the Ìð¹ÏÊÓƵ of Utah School of Medicine, is one of the primary investigators with Project Gemini. He is working with an international team of more than a dozen urologists, andrologists and geneticists from seven countries who see roughly 20-thousand patients seeking infertility treatments each year. James Hotaling, M.D., U of U assistant professor of surgery, and Douglas Carrell, Ph.D, U of U professor or surgery, are co-investigators on GEMINI. They, along with the rest of the team hope to change the way male infertility is not only diagnosed, but treated.
