Clinical Implications
Dr. Lundy said between 100 and 200 practicing reproductive urologists across the country regularly communicate with each other. He first raised the idea of creating a consortium with friends and colleagues and then discussed it at scientific meetings. The network steadily gained traction and is continuing to add institutions. “There’s a great deal of excitement in our community about this,” Dr. Lundy said.
MOBYUS, which is IRB approved, has a database with data from more than 4000 patients. The consortium has not received any industry funding but plans to pursue grant applications in the future.
The MOBYUS website includes a list of its member institutions and leading investigators and its three proof-of-principle manuscripts published to date. The team identifies new research projects at monthly virtual meetings.
Dr. Lundy said MOBYUS’ main goal is to identify a treatment that will change the avenue available for a couple to get pregnant. For example, he said, if a man has zero sperm in his semen, he often requires surgery to find and remove sperm from the testicle. If medications can produce low sperm counts, sperm found in the ejaculate can be frozen and surgery can be avoided.
Dr. Lundy said MOBYUS’ two publications on medical therapies have changed clinical practice, as he and many others have begun to provide the treatments on more carefully selected patients with good outcomes.
Dr. Nam said patients want to know what they can expect from therapies and these research findings will have “a lot of clinical implications” in counseling them.
The MOBYUS team will be describing the consortium and its goals in an abstract presentation at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Scientific Congress & Expo, to be held October 19-23 in Denver, Colorado, and in an oral presentation at the Sexual Medicine Society of North America’s annual fall scientific meeting, to be held October 17-20 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The sources in this story reported no relevant financial conflicts of interest.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.