Breakthrough In Lab Sperm Offers Hope For Infertility

A new breakthrough in laboratory sperm has offered hope for thousands of couples struggling to conceive worldwide after scientists successfully created human sperm from skin cells. It builds on previous research that used skin cells to create mice sperm in a laboratory and the medical feat could eventually lead to a treatment for infertility. These are the findings of a study published on Tuesday in the Scientific Reports, the online journal of ‘Nature.’ The research was carried out by scientists at Stanford University in the United States.

Infertility is the inability of a person, animal or plant, to reproduce by natural means. The researchers said they were working to find a solution for the roughly 15 per cent of couples worldwide, who are unable to have children and whose only option is to use donated sperm or eggs. In Nigeria, one out of every four couples has fertility challenge and low sperm count as well as zero sperm account for infertility among men.

‘What to do when someone who wants to have a child lacks gametes (eggs or sperm)?’ asked Carlos Simon, the scientific director of the Valencian Infertility Institute, Spain’s first medical institution fully dedicated to assisted reproduction. ‘

This is the problem we want to address, to be able to create gametes in people who do not have them.’ They were inspired by the work of Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka and Britain’s John Gordon, who in 2012 shared a Nobel prize for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells. Simon and his team managed to re-programme mature skin cells by introducing a cocktail of genes needed to create gametes.

Within a month the skin cell was transformed to become a germ cell, which can develop into sperm or an egg, but it did not have the ability to fertilise, they found. ‘This is a sperm, but it needs a further maturation phase to become a gamete. This is just the beginning,’ Simon said.