Paul J. Turek
Dr. Paul J Turek is an American physician and surgeon, men's reproductive health specialist, and businessman. Turek is a recent recipient of a National Institutes of Health grant for research designed to help infertile men become fathers using stem cells.
Early life
Turek was born in Manchester, Connecticut, to immigrant parents. His mother was the administrative secretary in the Manchester public school system, while his father was a sheet metal mechanic and welder. He attended Manchester High School and graduated salutatorian in 1978.Education and Training
At Yale College he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, received the Henry J. Belknap Prize in the Biological Sciences, and co-authored several scientific publications from work in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Handschumacher in the Department of Pharmacology at the Yale School of Medicine. While at Stanford Medical School, he participated in immunology research and developed an interest in the surgical discipline of urology. He pursued his internship and residency training in urology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, he developed an interest in urologic microsurgery and reproductive medicine and soon after pursued fellowship training in microsurgery and male reproductive medicine under the guidance of Dr. Larry Lipshultz at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. After completing his fellowship, he was recruited to the faculty of the University of California San Francisco.Medical background
Turek is a board-certified urologist and microsurgeon, specializing in male fertility. He has performed and published research in men's reproductive health issues including genetic infertility, ejaculatory duct obstruction, immunologic infertility, quality of life issues with infertility, testis cancer and stem cell science, and has developed several techniques for evaluating and treating male infertility. While at UCSF, he was Director of the Male Reproductive Clinical Laboratory, Program Leader of PROGENI, Director of the UCSF Men's Reproductive Health Clinic and Research Program, and the director of a National Institutes of Health grant to train new faculty in men's reproductive health. He has authored more than 175 publications on clinical and scientific issues in reproductive health. Through his published work, he is a proponent of the theory that male infertility is an early marker for other diseases that occur later in life. He became a full professor, with an endowed chair in teaching funded by the Academy at UCSF, a chair he later abandoned in favor of starting his own private clinic.He is now Director of The Turek Clinics, medical centers in California that specialize exclusively in men's reproductive health care. He was President in 2011 of the American Society of Andrology and the Society of Male Reproduction and Urology in 2013.
Research and inventions
Turek has designed and led in numerous key research programs, as well as inventing several procedures, that have had significant impact on the science of men's reproductive health. Turek is an advocate for men's general health, and speaks about on the topic on television and at companies such as Google. He is on the medical advisory board for Fertile Hope, a LIVESTRONG Foundation initiative.FNA Mapping
Turek is the inventor of Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA) Mapping, also known less formally as sperm mapping, testicular cartography, or "GPS for the testis." FNA Mapping is a non-invasive office procedure that can be performed in a standardized, template fashion to identify men who qualify for, and assist in the planning of, sperm retrieval for IVF-ICSI. This technique has been important because it has improved identification of men who are likely to have a successful sperm retrieval while at the same time avoiding costly and unnecessary assisted reproductive techniques. FNA Mapping has become a fundamental procedure in the profession and has been adopted at most reproductive centers around the world.The success of assisted reproductive techniques such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) encouraged reproductive clinicians to look beyond the ejaculate and into the male reproductive tract to find sperm. In men with no sperm count, it soon became clear that sperm could be found in the testes and used with ICSI, but sperm production was characteristically "patchy" or "focal" in azoospermic testes. FNA Mapping was designed to diagnose the degree of "patchiness" of sperm production in azoospermic men and determine, among other things, whether a sperm retrieval would succeed in a specific patient. Prior to FNA Mapping, testis biopsy was the major procedure for determining the quality of sperm presence. Testis biopsy is a more invasive procedure than FNA Mapping, and studies have shown that FNA Mapping provides better and more complete information about sperm presence.
In addition, FNA Mapping has been used to determine the effectiveness of mapping in patients after sterilizing chemotherapy, the ability to find and diagnose small testis tumors, and the ability of mapping to precisely define subsets of infertile men for more accurate phenotyping for molecular biology and genetic studies.,
Ejaculatory duct obstruction and ejaculatory duct mamometry
In a series of papers, Turek and his team made a significant advancement in the diagnosis of ejaculatory duct obstruction as a cause of male infertility by studying and investigating the approach and limitations of current treatments for this condition., This led to a prospective, comparative study of currently used techniques to diagnosis EDO followed by the invention and publication of a dynamic, physiologically relevant test, termed ejaculatory duct manometry, to definitively diagnose this surgical condition.Evolving the hypoosmotic swelling test
The Hypoosmotic Swelling Test is a laboratory test to measure the functional integrity of the human sperm membrane. In this test, the sperm is exposed to a hypososmotic solution consisting of a 50:50 mixture of 150 mosmol fructose and 150 mosmol sodium citrate. The tails of normal sperm will swell when exposed to this solution, whereas damaged sperm with low motility will not swell measurably.Although a moving or motile sperm was traditionally required for use with this technique, some infertile men have genetically immotile sperm and are unable to take advantage of this technology to become fathers. In early research in this area, Turek tried to understand more about how sperm "viability" relates to "motility." Subsequently, his team evolved the Hypoosmotic Swelling Test into a therapeutic tool that harmlessly and physiologically "pokes" a non-moving sperm to determine whether it is alive and therefore able to be used for ICSI. This technique was subsequently applied to men with genetically immotile sperm with success and this technique is now used routinely in many reproductive centers worldwide.