There is an urgent need to develop new methods for male contraception, however a major barrier to drug discovery has been the lack of validated targets and the absence of an effective high-throughput phenotypic screening system. To address this deficit, we developed a fully-automated robotic screening platform that provided quantitative evaluation of compound activity against two key attributes of human sperm function: motility and acrosome reaction.  In order to accelerate contraceptive development, we screened the comprehensive collection of 12,000 molecules that make up the ReFRAME repurposing library, comprising nearly all the small molecules that have been approved or have undergone clinical development, or have significant preclinical profiling. We identified several compounds that potently inhibit motility representing either novel drug candidates or routes to target identification. This platform will now allow for major drug discovery programmes that address the critical gap in the contraceptive portfolio as well as uncover novel human sperm biology.

This data contains raw, processed and averaged data of a high-throughput screen looking at downregulating the motility of human sperm.

Raw data contains coordinates of sperm tracks

Processed data contains calculated sperm motility parameters (recorded 2 positions per well)

Averaged data contains averaged data of both well positions

The source code to look and process this file, will be provided with the final paper.