2023 : A cruciate year for the CRESAM !
This year was marked by several major strategic and scientific advances for Cresam.
At the initiative of Dr. Jean-Yves Routier, Cresam formed two important partnerships in order to develop a new research area in the reproduction of wild carnivores: In Vitro Fertilization in the cheetah and the development of an embryo bank.
The first partnership was the alliance with human medicine, with the arrival at Cresam of Professor Michaël Grynberg, a renowned specialist in IVF in women, and a technician also very experienced in this field, Emilie Visentin.
The goal was to implement, in animals, techniques used in human medicine, egg collection by a non-invasive route if possible, selection of the best male semen (TMS = Migration Survival Test), and if possible, obtain embryos by in vitro fertilization that could be frozen and reimplanted in recipient females. All this in the cheetah, a species whose reproduction is today complicated and compromised in the natural state.
The second partnership was the rapprochement with a young association working for the conservation of cheetahs: the Cheetah Generation, located about fifty kilometers from Léphalalé in South Africa, created by Florence Babin.
Spring – Summer 2023: Very quickly, thanks to these two partnerships, an IVF laboratory comparable to the best in French hospitals was created in South Africa, in this reserve in the Limpopo province where Cresam had already started working in 2022. It should be noted that the MSD laboratory provided the blood analyzers free of charge.
May 2023: Cresam carries out its first tests of egg collection from cats previously stimulated on the ovarian level in a Parisian veterinary clinic, the Jouffroy Clinic. These collections are a success, both for those carried out by laparotomy (invasive technique) and those carried out by ultrasound-guided puncture (minimally invasive technique used in women by vaginal route, transcutaneous route in cats and cheetahs). It should be noted that the ovarian follicles during punctures are 20 minutes in women and only 4 minutes in cheetahs, hence an increased technical difficulty. The hormonal protocols used to “prepare” these cats were also validated on this occasion.
September 2023: The IVF laboratory being set up and operational from the end of the summer, it is therefore a new mission that Cresam is organizing in AFS. Four veterinarians selected some female cheetahs from the reserve, checked their state of health and gave them a complete blood test as well as a gynecological assessment (smears, ultrasounds, hormone dosages), before putting them all in anoestrus synchronously.
October/November 2023: The entire Cresam IVF team, composed of 6 French veterinarians, a South African veterinarian, a French doctor and a technician, both specialized in IVF in women, and the Cheetah Generation team, met to finalize and finally validate the procedures for putting cheetahs back into heat and stimulating ovarian follicles. The Cresam team then successfully collected oocytes by ultrasound-guided transcutaneous route (minimally invasive) from these females. They also collected semen by electro-ejaculation from males, and carried out its qualitative improvement by column migration (TMS). Finally, Cresam carried out in vitro fertilization of the collected oocytes, and obtained 12 embryos from different fathers and mothers. The proper development of these was monitored up to D+5 and D+6 after fertilization, and the embryos were then frozen. In human medicine, embryos are reimplanted in women on D+5. For our part, we preferred to freeze the embryos on D+6, so as to take the time to select and prepare the recipient females before a next mission, in early 2024.
There are no comments published yet.