Fertility & Sterility On Air - Unplugged Micro-Episode: F&S Reports Special Issue with Dr. Pierre Comizzoli and Dr. Richard Paulson

In this micro-episode, we bring you an interview with Richard Paulson and Pierre Comizzoli, editors of the F&S Reports Special Issue, “Bridging Studies in Wild Animal Species and Humans to Better Understand, Assist, and Control Reproduction." Join us to discuss the connection between wild animal research and reproductive medicine. This interview provides an overview of this special issue, which is a series of articles in F&S Reports on topics ranging from koala reproduction to rhino ovarian tissue cryopreservation, from the microbiome to stem cells.

View F&S Reports, April 2025, Volume 6, Supplement 1S1-66:  https://www.fertstertreports.org/issue/S2666-3341(25)X0003-9

View the sister journals at:

• https://www.fertstertreviews.org
• https://www.fertstertreports.org
• https://www.fertstertscience.org

Welcome to Fertility and Sterility On Air, the podcast where you can stay current on the latest global research in the field of reproductive medicine. This podcast brings you an overview of this month's journal, in-depth discussion with authors, and other special features. F&S On Air is brought to you by the Fertility and Sterility family of journals in conjunction with the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Hi to our usual F&S Unplugged listeners. This is Molly Kornfield, one of the usual F&S Unplugged hosts, but you're actually joining us today for a micro-episode to highlight a special issue in F&S Reports. It's called Bridging Studies in Wild Animal Species and Humans to Better Understand, Assist, and Control Reproduction.

And I'm joined today by the two editors of this piece, our very own F&S Reports editor-in-chief, Rick Paulsen, and the guest editor who really spearheaded this entire special issue, Pierre Comizzoli, a research veterinarian at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C. So I'm so excited to be here with both of you today. How are you guys doing today? Doing great, Molly. Thanks so much for featuring this special issue.

It's something I'm very proud of and I'm hoping our readers are going to enjoy it. This topic was really exciting to me. I love the idea of doing a special issue to highlight the interconnectedness of human reproductive research and reproduction in wild animal species.

What really inspired you both to want to develop this special issue, whose idea was it, and then how did you go about finding all these incredible authors? Well, so I'll take the first bite of that, okay, because it is I who contacted Pierre to say, I've wanted to do a special issue like this for a long time. What do you think? And he ran with it in a very impressive way and recruited all the authors and put it all together. But I've always felt that we don't study other species enough.

We that focus on human reproduction really don't have that ability to compare. And not very many ASR members go to the SSR meeting where, for example, you hear about all sorts of species and how different implantation is, how different placentation is, how differently are managed all these different aspects of reproduction that we take for granted. And so I was so pleased that Pierre agreed and, as you said, he spearheaded it and ran forward.

So Pierre, I think you'll have to answer how it is that you found all these great authors. Yeah, so first of all, I wanted really to thank Dr. Paulson for suggesting this really great idea, because I belong to a relatively small community of people who study extensively animal reproduction in wildlife and endangered species. And this is very important for us to be connected to medical doctors and fertility specialists, like all the members of ASRM, because we do have a lot to learn from your community.

But also, we think that by studying also those kind of unique species, we do have also something to bring to the topic. So when we started to draft the content of this special issue, I contacted some of my close colleagues who immediately, like me, were very interested and said, oh yes, that would be a very good opportunity to promote our work to a different scientific community and especially to show that there is a close relation between really what we observe on a daily basis in our wild species in terms of reproduction or fertility or even contraception and what has been developed for decades in humans. Thank you.

I wanted to highlight some of the things that I thought really surprised me when I was reading the issue, just to kind of inspire people to check out these articles. It's not something you're going to read in one sitting, but I would just pull up an article here or there over your coffee or when you have a gap in the afternoon in your clinic schedule, because I just think these are really rich and kind of like mini-review style pieces. So Vance Trudeau was writing about amphibian research, amphibian reproductive research, and I think we've all heard about the early pregnancy tests done on rabbits, and people would say, did the rabbit die? The rabbit always died.

But the early pregnancy test was actually initially discovered on the Xenopus laevis frog, the African clawed frog. And if the frog ovulated, then that's confirming pregnancy from injecting HCG from the prospective mother's urine. And the fact that pituitary substances can induce ovulation was just completely incidentally found.

They were just trying to study color change in this kind of frog. And so I thought that was really eye-opening to me, and it really showed the importance of how animal research is contributing to human research, vice versa. But it's not just historical, this is so ongoing.

So then George Bentley is writing about avian research and how that contributes. And the discovery of Taq polymerase, GFP, incredible description of gonadotropin inhibitory hormone or RF amide-related peptide in mammals. So I would encourage you guys to check that out.

And then there's a whole issue on koalas, which was just, there's a cute picture in there. I encourage everyone to look at the cute picture. But just the physiology of the koala pouch was really eye-opening to me.

And anything that you guys want to highlight for the readers, anything you think is like a can't miss, what was your personal favorite? Okay, so I would say that we tried to choose species that were, okay, so it's from amphibians to rhinos and trying to be very broad and to show that there is a high relevance to human reproduction. But what's very interesting, actually, is that when you go to, when you take a class about, you know, biology 101, you will study, you know, basic things in amphibians or, you know, in rodents and stuff like that. But it's not necessarily obvious that, you know, those very basic, that basic knowledge is also extremely important, not only for, you know, the Xenopus, but also for other amphibians.

And that's been a way to develop a lot of different strategies to reproduce those amphibians. And of course, they are all different with each other, which complicates also the task to really understand. But what's really exciting is that within all the diversity that we explore in reproduction, we always find some kind of interesting common points with human reproduction.

And sometimes it's really something that could potentially, I'm not saying that it's always the case, but it could potentially, you know, lead to a solution to treat infertility syndromes in humans. So I'm not saying that, you know, some of those articles, you know, are necessarily always addressing that. But I would, you know, I would like to really highlight really the article about, you know, what do women and rhinos have in common? This one was written by my colleague, Susanna Williams.

And it's, it's very good. It's, and by the way, it's, yeah, people will learn a lot about that. And we'll probably, you know, that things that they really never thought about before.

And I would say that every single article is super interesting, because the format of the mini-reviews also really forced each author really to try to be concise and to the point, you know, there is no kind of, of course, there is some minimal background, but really, they had really to be very specific about, okay, what is really the link between wild animals and humans? So I had to go down memory lane a little bit, Molly, because when I was junior faculty, of course, when you're junior faculty at a university, you get assigned all the lectures to give to the students and so on. And so I had to look up a million things, including HCG. And that was when I first heard about the Xenopus pregnancy test.

And I had no idea. I'd heard about the rabbit test. I had no idea it was done in the toad.

And this was very reassuring, because, of course, I had long forgotten about that lecture, which was 30 plus years ago. So to see it here was great. I have to tell you that my personal favorite was actually, if you really like to geek out on pathology, I do.

I love histology. And there is a comparative reproductive pathology, a walk on the wild side. If you want to be reassured that not only do mouse embryos look a lot like human embryos, you'll be reassured that a lot of their other cells also look very similar.

Yes, we do come from evolution, and evolution is a part of what we do. I'd also mention the fact that we have an article on gonadal tissue preservation technologies and culture offer opportunities to bridge knowledge between wildlife and humans. That's another really good opportunity for us, I think, to learn and both, I think, to enhance that technology in humans, as well as then to take it back to exotic species and allow species preservation in some of these threatened species that are out there.

Branching off of that, so do you guys have ideas for how we can increase collaboration between human and animal, endocrine and reproductive researchers? Because we all really have these identical goals, which is the pursuit of knowledge, progress in ART, as this reproductive technology, and can people apply for grants together? How can you get connected with people? If people are getting really inspired by this issue, do you have any suggestions for them to get more involved? Well, I have to say that, again, I have to thank Dr. Paulson, because we know each other for a long time. I was invited a long time ago to be a speaker at the ASRM conference. It was a very important opportunity for me because I was able to present my work in front of a lot of eminent specialists.

I have to say that this kind of cross-pollination is very important to have specialists from my area going to your conferences and vice versa. I think we need to build more bridges that way, because then after that, of course, you give the presentation, but you get to talk to a lot of people. Then after that, people have questions or even suggestions, say, hey, by the way, I never thought of that.

What if also, when we talk about difficulties to reproduce our giant pandas or elephants, I mean, people can come up also, medical doctors can come up with some kind of interesting ideas. This is very important. In order to foster more collaboration, I think we need to have more of these kind of interactions during our conferences and to try to be a little bit more open-minded and to think out of the box, which is really important.

Also, really, what we do a lot in our laboratory is to make sure that we also have a lot of trainees, people coming from graduate schools or postgraduate schools, and they come with us and they learn. We do have medical doctors in our lab also trying to understand what we are doing and trying to be inspired. That's very, very important, because to me, this is the next generation also that's really playing a critical role in that area.

I think we are building right now more and more bridges. Yeah, knowledge and learning about other species is the best way to fight sort of the, I don't know whether you could apply the word xenophobia to the fact that we are so insular in our focus on homo sapiens as a species. I guess that's the nature of our field, is that we focus on the one species.

But it expands the mind and will help us move forward in the field, I think. Well, thank you. That's all very enlightening and it's really inspiring too.

I think people are going to have a lot of new ideas reading this issue. Anything else either of you would like to share about the issue before we close for today? I would say that there are also some articles that are a little bit more like exploratory, like the one about the microbiome, because again, microbiome is something that is really, it's a hot topic in human medicine, not only in reproductive medicine. And I would say that we are all really in awe, when we see what's all the progress that's been done in terms of human microbiome, even in the reproductive tract.

And we wish we could be at the same stage for a lot of wild species that we are studying. And it's highly inspiring. And it's really the cutting edge because every day now we discover that the microbiome has a role on the physiology, on the biology of the behavior and of the species.

So this is fascinating. And I think this is an area really of collaboration again, between human and animal reproduction. And then there is a, last but not least, there is also an article about the exposome.

So exposome is kind of, it's not a new term, but it's a very important concept, because it tells you that, you know, whatever, wherever we live, we share always some kind of, you know, we have connections, we share the same habitat with between human and wild species. Of course, in urban area, it's not necessarily the case. But in a lot of places all around the world, you know, it's very, very important to understand reproductive health of wild animals, because it can give you a clue about really what is the status of the reproductive health in human.

So that kind of interaction at the larger scale, not that the individual scale, but that the population level, this is extremely important. Polly, I would just conclude by pointing out that this is the third special issue that F&S Reports has put out. Our previous ones were in 2022, Reimagining Reproductive Health and Eliminating Disparate Care, Disparate Access, and Disparate Outcomes.

And then in 2023, we had a special issue on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of GNRH, which, by the way, was discovered in other animal species and not Homo sapiens. I have tried to bring the philosophy of curiosity and expanding the scientific horizon to this journal, and I hope that our listeners are going to be motivated to say, hey, I've got an interesting idea, let me see if I can get it published in F&S Reports, because we're going to look at it with that curiosity and that mindset. You don't have to have a thousand patients randomized into a randomized clinical trial.

If you've got an interesting idea and you've got an interesting perspective, we're interested in that, just as we were interested in bringing you these bridging studies in wild animal species and humans, so that we can better understand, assist, and control reproduction, because that really is what we are all about in our subspecialty. So thanks very much, Molly, for giving us this opportunity to feature and highlight this special issue. I'm very proud of it.

I'm super thankful to Pierre for getting all of his friends to write these wonderful articles for us. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I hope all of the listeners check it out. You'll really enjoy it.

It's like being back in high school biology class, just as I think Pierre pointed out. That's absolutely a great description. As I was reading it, I felt like I was in my Bio 101 hearing all these incredible stories of animals and then applying it to my actual clinical patients.

So thank you so much to you both. Thank you. This concludes our episode of Fertility and Sterility on Air, brought to you by Fertility and Sterility in conjunction with the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

This podcast is produced by Dr. Molly Kornfield and Dr. Adriana Wong. This podcast was developed by Fertility and Sterility and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine as an educational resource and service to its members and other practicing clinicians. While the podcast reflects the views of the authors and the hosts, it is not intended to be the only approved standard of practice or to direct an exclusive course of treatment.

The opinions expressed are those of the discussants and do not reflect Fertility and Sterility or the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.