“Belgian medical researchers have restored sperm production in a man left infertile after childhood chemotherapy using testicular tissue that had been frozen for 16 years. A year after transplantation, the tissue showed active sperm production and yielded a mature sperm cell,” notes The Doomslayer.
Nature reports:
A cutting-edge operation has restored a man’s ability to make sperm by transplanting tissue samples that were removed from one of his testicles and frozen 16 years earlier, when he was still a boy. Scientists say that the remarkable achievement could mark the beginning of a new wave of fertility treatments…
In 2008, physicians at the University Hospital in Brussels removed a testicle from a ten-year-old boy and froze tissue samples that had been taken from it. The boy then received chemotherapy in preparation for a blood-stem-cell transplant to treat sickle-cell disease.
More than a decade later, he returned to the hospital as an adult with dreams of having children. Clinicians monitored him for two years and confirmed that he could not produce normal sperm on his own. They then grafted 11 of the tissue fragments — which by then had been frozen for 16 years — either into his remaining testicle or under the skin in his scrotum.
The grafts incubated there for a year, bathed in the hormones and other environmental cues found in an adult man. After that, the tissue fragments were removed and examined.
The team found sperm-producing stem cells and signs of active sperm production in several of the transplants. In a sample from one graft, they found a single mature sperm.
At that point, the researchers stopped their analysis and saved the rest of the graft in the hope that more sperm could be collected from it later and used for in vitro fertilization.
Earlier this year, Great Britain “welcomed its first baby born via a transplanted womb” from a deceased donor, reported The Doomslayer.
Surgeons in Oxford performed Great Britain’s first successful living-donor womb transplant in August 2023, when a 40-year-old woman donated her womb to her 34-year-old sister. As the BBC explained in 2023,
the first uterine transplant in the UK took place earlier this year. The patient was a 34-year-old with a genetic condition called MRKH, which affects 1 in 5,000 women….she was born with ovaries but no Fallopian tubes or uterus.
But her sister was born with ovaries, Fallopian tubes and a uterus, and wanted to donate her uterus to help enable this. She had completed her family, having given birth to two healthy babies….The operation to retrieve the uterus from the donor took 8 hours and 12 minutes, whilst the implantation operation took 9 hours and 20 minutes.
The recipient said she planned to have two children using the transplanted womb.
