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A STARTUP OUT of Utah, Paterna Biosciences, says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and used the sperm to make visibly healthy-looking embryos. The technique could eventually help men with certain types of infertility have biological children.
The findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal or independently verified. WIRED is the first to report the advance.
The process involves isolating sperm-making stem cells from testicular tissue and coaxing the cells into becoming fully-fledged sperm in a dish. Scientists have been attempting to produce sperm outside the body, known as in vitro spermatogenesis, for almost a century. A Japanese team was the first to produce viable mouse sperm in the lab in 2011, but making human sperm has turned out to be a more difficult task.
Another biotech company, Kallistem in France, claimed it achieved in vitro spermatogenesis in 2015, but some outside researchers questioned whether the sperm were fully developed, and the company did not prove that the sperm were able to fertilize eggs.
It takes a little over two months and several steps...