May The Best Sperm Win? New Device Sorts Cells For More Efficient IVF
For many couples, an infertility diagnosis can be a difficult time, leading to months or years of tests and treatments. Since 85-90% of infertility cases are treated with drugs or surgery, fertility professionals are constantly researching cutting edge treatments. And a recent invention may speed the rate of conception by identifying healthy sperm.
ScienceDaily reports that researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and Stanford University are testing a sperm sorting device to sort the healthy sperm from the unhealthy. This device is called SPARTAN, or Simple Periodic ARray for Trapping And IsolatioN, and basically creates an obstacle course for the sperm to swim through. The healthy sperm makes it through the fastest, and the scientists collect the cells to use for insemination.
“With SPARTAN, we not only get sperm with excellent motility, but also with normal morphology and better DNA integrity, helping families worldwide by reducing the stress of multiple IVF procedures, while potentially increasing pregnancy rates,” Erkan Tüzel, associate professor of physics, biomedical engineering, and computer science at WPI, said in a statement to ScienceDaily. “This could increase patients’ chances of getting pregnant.”
According to ScienceDaily, the SPARTAN is about 12 to 16 millimeters long and can be used right in a fertility clinic or Sperm Bank. This eliminates the need for clinics to freeze sperm samples and send them out for testing. Instead, a specialist can spend between five and 30 minutes processing a sample.
The U.S. commercial and diagnostic laboratory industry consists of 13,500 establishments, but highly specified projects like this one often solve niche problems for a variety of patients. In addition to helping women get pregnant faster, this device also may reduce the amount of money that couples spend on these treatments, which according to ScienceDaily, can add up to $15,000 per cycle.
Inventions like SPARTAN may be part of a growing trend of fertility technology. Of the technology patented in the U.S., about 90% of inventions receive utility patents to solve specific problems. And since delayed pregnancies and infertility are increasing, the medical industry might see more inventions to solve these problems.
DxNow, Inc. licensed a patent for SPARTAN in September and now the teams are waiting for FDA approval. If all goes as planned, ScienceDaily reports that SPARTAN will be on the market in July 2018.
“WPI brings an outstanding theoretical tool that allows us to understand how microscale objects, such as sperm, interact with their environment; and we are able to design this know-how into real microfluidic devices, clinically validate what we designed, and experimentally improve it into a real-world application,” Utkan Demirci, professor of radiology and electrical engineering at Stanford University said in a statement to ScienceDaily.
The SPARTAN project received funding from the National Science Foundation.
