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Would gene therapy for the treatment of male infertility be safe?

Nature Clinical Practice Urology volume 5, pages 594–595 (2008)Cite this article

Gene therapy offers the potential to correct genetic defects, including reproductive defects in men with infertility. The safety of gene therapy for male infertility is a major issue that must be addressed, and the vector employed for gene therapy is of paramount importance. The ideal vector should be immunologically inert, target only cell types with the deficiency, be capable of delivering large pieces of genetic material, integrate into an exact site in a chromosome or work as an episome, have a mechanism to limit or even destroy the function if necessary, and infect both dividing and nondividing cells.1 This article will discuss the possible gene therapy vectors for male infertility, and the safety issues involved.

A range of approaches are under development for gene therapy, including chemical methods (e.g. liposomes, microparticles, nanoparticles, microadhesive particles and gels and peptide ligands), mechanical approaches (e.g. gene gun, liquid jet injection, nebulizer and microenhance arrays), physical techniques (e.g. electroporation, sonoporation, magnetofection and laser irradiation) and biological processes (e.g. bacterial vector, bacterial ghost and viruses).2 Not all approaches, however, would be useful for male infertility, given their mode of administration and pharmacokinetics.2

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge grants from the NIH (NIH 5 P01 HD36289, NIH 1 R01 DK078121, NIH K12 KDK083014, NIH 5 T32 DK00763) and the Department Of Defense, US Army Materiel Command (PC061154), which partly support the reproductive biology and cancer studies in the Lamb laboratory.

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  1. Scott Department of Urology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA dlamb@bcm.tmc.edu

Authors and Affiliations

  1. and Vice Chairman for Research at the Scott Department of Urology, DJ Lamb is the Lester and Sue Smith Chair in Urologic Research, Professor of Urology and Molecular and Cellular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA.,

    Dolores J Lamb

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The author declared that she has received research grant support from the American Urological Association Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Department of Defense.

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Lamb, D. Would gene therapy for the treatment of male infertility be safe?. Nat Rev Urol 5, 594–595 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncpuro1238

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