Wafiya Jibrin
Researcher at the University of Dundee School of Medicine who led a 2026 cell-culture test of whether rapamycin can shield sperm-precursor cells from the cancer drug cisplatin
School of Medicine, University of Dundee (at the time of the study, 2026)
Cisplatin is a platinum-based chemotherapy drug used against many childhood and adult cancers. It kills dividing cells, and that includes the cells in the testis that will later make sperm, so boys treated for cancer can become infertile as adults. In mouse ovaries, earlier work had suggested that rapamycin, a drug that switches off mTOR (the cell's growth-control kinase), can put egg-cell precursors into a quieter state and protect them from chemotherapy. Wafiya Jibrin was first author of the 2026 Atlas study that asked whether the same trick works for the male side (JIB2026).
The team exposed GC6-spg cells, a mouse cell line that behaves like spermatogonia (the stem-like cells that give rise to sperm), to cisplatin with and without rapamycin. Rapamycin did not reduce the damage. The result is a useful negative one: a protective strategy reported in female fertility models cannot simply be carried over to the testis. It was shown only in a cell line in a dish, not in animals or in patients.
The study came from Federica Lopes's group in the School of Medicine at the University of Dundee, which works on fertility preservation for young cancer patients. PubMed lists no other papers under this name, and no institutional page could be found, so the Dundee affiliation shown is the one on the 2026 paper.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | M | Rapamycin co-exposure fails to reduce cisplatin-induced damage in GC6-spg spermatogonial cell line. JIB2026 First author: tested rapamycin as a shield for a mouse spermatogonial cell line exposed to cisplatin and found that it gave no protection. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Wafiya Jibrin.
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- Federica Lopes Reproductive biologist and Lecturer at the University of Dundee who studies how chemotherapy damages the immature testis and ovary, with the aim of protecting the future fertility of children treated for cancer
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