Brian Dale

Brian Dale (31 August 1951) is a British reproductive scientist living in Sorrento, Italy. He is currently owner and Director of the Centre for Assisted Fertilization, which has offices in Naples and Rome and Director of London Fertility Associates Ltd in London. He is also a founder and partner in the Swiss-based company, International Fertility Associates.

While working for the Stazione Zoologica, Naples, and on leave at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda in 1983, he was attributed with the discovery of a soluble sperm factor in spermatozoa that is responsible for the activation of oocytes. His studies span animals and humans, from the identification of novel ion channels specific to fertilization, the fertilization channels, to processes leading to blastocyst formation in the human embryo Dr Dale has developed and patented with Jacques Cohen equipment that filters and regulates air quality in IVF laboratories( CODA) used worldwide today to improve the success rates in human in vitro reproductive technologies.

He is founder and Editor in Chief of the International peer review journal of embryology, Zygote, published by Cambridge University Press and was visiting professor and visiting scientist at the University of Western Australia and NIH respectively.

Early career and education Dale was born in Stockport UK, where he attended Burnage Grammar School. He received a B.Sc. from the University of Manchester in zoology in 1972 with a First Class Honours. An M.Sc. in 1973 and then finally a Ph.D. in cell biology from the same university. For his contribution to the understanding of basic processes in the mechanism of fertilization he was awarded the D.Sc. in 1990(Manchester University).

Reproductive science In 1977, Dale joined the Stazione Zoologica in Naples as a post-doctoral fellow of the Royal Society of Pathology, London where he joined the team of Alberto Monroy to study mechanisms of fertilization. One of his first discoveries, with Louis J De Felice from the US, was a novel non specific ion channel, the fertilization channel, that was gated by the spermatozoon, and later led to the hypothesis of a soluble sperm borne activating factor, Fellow of the Royal College of Pathology, London, 2010.