Biomedical Sciences

Spears' Lab awarded first ESHRE grant

January: Professor Norah Spears, has been awarded the first research grant by The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE).

Congratulations to Prof Norah Spears, who has been awarded the first research grant by The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). The grant of €150,000 was awarded with emphasis on originality, feasability and expected impact and was selected from a total of 259 applications.

The project aims to prevent the loss of female fertility during cancer treatment. Researchers will test the viability of tyrosine kinase inhibitors in protecting the ovary from chemotherapy-induced damage and will use a novel ovarian culture system allowing high-thoroughput and rapid quantitative analysis.

The project will look for compounds which will protect the ovary against damage from the alkylating-like chemotherapy drug cisplatin.

The long term general aim is to establish the viability of this culture system for large scale drug screening.

Recent decades have seen a steady increase in the survival rates of cancer patients, and a key concern is the effect of treatments on subsequent fertility. At present, options are mainly concentrated on preserving fertility, though ideally treatments would prevent damage from occurring in the first place.

Professor Norah SpearsCentre for Integrative Physiology