A man in his early 20s has received the world’s first sperm-making stem cell transplant in a new procedure that could be groundbreaking for infertility treatment.
Until now, the procedure had only been tested in animals. But it successfully allowed male mice and monkeys to father offspring.
The patient was diagnosed with azoospermia, a condition that causes no sperm to be present in his ejaculate and makes it impossible to naturally conceive a child, after receiving chemotherapy as a child to treat bone cancer.
Men can develop azoospermia for a number of reasons, including hormonal dysfunction, a blockage along the reproductive tract and certain genetic conditions.
For this clinical trial, doctors implanted the man’s own stem cells — which were harvested and frozen during his childhood before he underwent chemotherapy — into his reproductive system.
In this case, the doctors used sperm-forming stem cells, which are present in the testicles at birth and later mature into sperm cells during puberty. If the transplant succeeds, the patient should begin producing sperm.
The historic procedure is detailed in a paper published on the preprint server medRxiv, which features research that is still undergoing review.
