TY - JOUR
T1 - Sperm syringe
T2 - 3D sorting platform for assisted reproduction
AU - Yazdan Parast, Farin
AU - O'Bryan, Moira K.
AU - Nosrati, Reza
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Grants (DP190100343 and DP210103361) to R.N. The authors thank Reza Maddah for his help with making Movie S2 , Supporting Information that indicates the operation of the device.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors.
PY - 2022/9
Y1 - 2022/9
N2 - Selection of high-quality sperm is crucial to assisted reproduction. However, conventional clinical methods for sperm selection are manual and prone to operator errors. This article presents ‘sperm syringe', a scalable technology that mimics the highly parallelized 3D selection process in vivo via a 3D network of 560 microchannels to select high-quality sperm. Sperm syringe retrieves more than 41% of healthy sperm from the initial sperm sample in under 15 min, providing a sufficient volume (≈500 µL) and number (1,600,000) of high-quality sperm for fertility treatments. Experiments with bull and human sperm indicate 65% improvement in selected sperm morphology and DNA integrity, considerably outperforming the current best clinical practices. This approach enables the selection of a subpopulation of high-quality human sperm from an oligozoospermia sample with DNA integrity below the reference value for fertility. The fabrication method of the device is also simple and scalable, representing a commercially viable technology for translation and clinical adoption. Sperm syringe provides a promising opportunity for clinics to use less invasive assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) over intracytoplasmic sperm injection, thus reducing the associated clinical workload and optimizing long-term health outcomes for ART-conceived children.
AB - Selection of high-quality sperm is crucial to assisted reproduction. However, conventional clinical methods for sperm selection are manual and prone to operator errors. This article presents ‘sperm syringe', a scalable technology that mimics the highly parallelized 3D selection process in vivo via a 3D network of 560 microchannels to select high-quality sperm. Sperm syringe retrieves more than 41% of healthy sperm from the initial sperm sample in under 15 min, providing a sufficient volume (≈500 µL) and number (1,600,000) of high-quality sperm for fertility treatments. Experiments with bull and human sperm indicate 65% improvement in selected sperm morphology and DNA integrity, considerably outperforming the current best clinical practices. This approach enables the selection of a subpopulation of high-quality human sperm from an oligozoospermia sample with DNA integrity below the reference value for fertility. The fabrication method of the device is also simple and scalable, representing a commercially viable technology for translation and clinical adoption. Sperm syringe provides a promising opportunity for clinics to use less invasive assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) over intracytoplasmic sperm injection, thus reducing the associated clinical workload and optimizing long-term health outcomes for ART-conceived children.
KW - 3D printing
KW - assisted reproduction
KW - infertility
KW - microfluidics
KW - sperm selection
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85125601491&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/admt.202101291
DO - 10.1002/admt.202101291
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85125601491
VL - 7
JO - Advanced Materials Technologies
JF - Advanced Materials Technologies
SN - 2365-709X
IS - 9
M1 - 2101291
ER -
