Lab made sperm

Driving home from work yesterday evening, an item caught my ear on the PM programme on Radio 4.

A team, led by Professor Karim Nayernia at the Georg-August University in Gottingen, Germany, using stem cells taken from a mouse embryo, managed to isolate some stem cells that had begun to develop as sperm. They encouraged these spermatological stem cells to grow into adult sperm cells, injected some of these into female mouse eggs, took the successfully fertilised eggs, and implanted them into a female mouse. Seven baby mice were successfully produced.

I think they took about 600 or so attempts to successfully fertilise and implant eggs, and the baby mice that were produced had some abnormalities - some were very large, some very small, and some developed tumours. (Read the abstract from the research paper).

Professor Nayernia claims that this and additional research will help us to understand how men produce sperm, and why some men are unable to do this.

Moving from this kind of mouse stem cell research to working with and 'creating' human spermatological stem cells is going to take some time and work, and there are a number of ethical, technical and safety barriers to be overcome. Also, some researchers suggest that using adult stem cells from umbilical cord blood consistently produces more promising results than using embryonic stem cells.

I'll let the scientists figure this one out, but I don't reckon any kind of treatment will be available for a while yet.