One startup says it has produced human sperm in a lab and used it to create embryos

The goal, he says, is to generate thousands of sperm from a standard tissue biopsy. The company has achieved a high success rate in generating sperm from dozens of tissue samples.

Early tests have shown that lab-made sperm appear “effectively identical” to naturally made sperm, Pastusak says. However, the procedure is not yet ready to be used to initiate pregnancy. Paterna created the embryos as an early test to verify that the sperm made in the laboratory were indeed viable. The company plans to conduct a larger, more comprehensive study including infertile men. Paterna will extract sperm from ejaculate or testicular tissue and use his method to generate sperm for men. From there, the company will use both extracted sperm and laboratory-grown sperm to fertilize eggs in the laboratory, compare fertilization rates between the two groups, and analyze the resulting embryos for physical and genetic abnormalities.

“This will tell us a lot regarding the efficacy and safety of this approach,” Pastusak says. “It will tell us whether there are any mutations created by the process in the lab.” After that, experiments with laboratory-grown sperm could begin to initiate pregnancy as soon as next year.

Certain types of medications, intrauterine insemination, traditional in vitro fertilization, or IVF, can help men reduce the amount or quality of sperm. But for men who don’t produce sperm at all, treatment options are more limited.

“In terms of male infertility, the most challenging scenarios for doctors are when men don’t have any sperm,” says Ryan Flanigan, a sperm retrieval surgeon at the Vancouver Prostate Center in Canada, who is not part of Paterna. “You see the emotional impact and impact on these individuals and couples.”

For these men, a surgical procedure that looks for sperm in testicular tissue is an option. This procedure requires general anesthesia and can take up to four hours, depending on how quickly sperm are found. Even in this case, surgeons fail to find sperm in a large percentage of cases.

The Paterna technique is designed to replace this procedure, instead a small biopsy of testicular tissue is taken in a doctor’s office. This tissue will be sent to Paterna, who will create sperm in the laboratory. The company plans to charge between $5,000 and $12,000 for the procedure.

Paterna’s technique could also be used for boys undergoing chemotherapy to treat cancer before puberty, since sperm-forming stem cells are present from birth, Flannigan says. Young cancer patients had the option of freezing testicular tissue and preserving it for years, but growing it back It remains experimentalNo births were reported.

Other efforts to produce sperm in the laboratory focus on induced pluripotent stems, or skin or blood cells that have been reprogrammed to an embryo-like state. These stem cells can be incorporated into any type of cell in the body using the right set of instructions. Scientists have succeeded in producing functional sperm and eggs from pluripotent stem cells in mice, and have produced healthy offspring. The technique known as In vitro gamete formationIt could be used to help same-sex couples have biological children, as an egg or sperm could hypothetically be created from a skin sample.

Paterna’s progress is exciting but cost will be a limiting factor for many patients in the United States and elsewhere where fertility treatments are expensive, says Justin Dobbin, MD, a urologist and director of men’s sexual health at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute.

“We’ve come up with so many amazing options in fertility care, yet so many of them aren’t covered by insurance,” he says.

“It does a great disservice to our patients, and to the world’s population, by not providing people with the means to achieve the family they want.”