Professor Chris Barratt to deliver Eshre keynote lecture on male infertility
Published On Mon 23 Jun 2014 by Roddy Isles
Professor Chris Barratt, one of the world’s foremost experts on male infertility, will deliver the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) in Munich later this month.
“ESHRE is by far the largest reproductive society in the world so it is a great honour to be asked to deliver the keynote lecture,” said Professor Barratt, who is Head of the Reproductive Medicine Group at the University of Dundee.
“I will be speaking on the clinical significance of calcium-signalling pathways which mediate sperm motility . This is an area of research where we have made significant breakthroughs which could have a real impact on our understanding and treatment of male infertility.”
Professor Barratt was a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for six years and is Director of the World Health Organisation (2012-2014) Male Fertility Expert Working Group.
He said many of the most important discoveries being made in the field of reproductive medicine related to male infertility, representing a stark generational change.
“Infertility affects one in seven couples, and in around 50 per cent of those cases the problem lies with the male,” said Professor Barratt. “Twenty years ago the figure would have been 90 per cent of the cases being focused on the female, but that was largely because male infertility was not widely understood.
“There has been a minor revolution in how we look at infertility. We now know that if you count all the causes of infertility, then failure of sperm is the most common one, so it makes a great deal of sense to concentrate a lot of our efforts on understanding why it happens, how we can diagnose it, and ultimately how we can treat it.”
Professor Barratt’s keynote lecture to ESHRE takes place on Monday June 30th at the annual meeting in Munich.
Later this year the University of Dundee will host an ESHRE campus symposium on human embryology which will see hundreds of scientists from around the world arrive in Dundee for a two-day event.
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