By Clare Wilson.
Rat germ cells and sperm are in a mouse testicle.
A group of people, including a man and a woman, wrote a paper about CC-BY 4.0 in the journal PLOS Biology.
After being implanted into mice, rat testicle cells produced sperm.
Children who have testicle tissue frozen before cancer treatment may be able to have the tissue reimplanted so they can one day have their own biological children, according to the University of Pennsylvania.
Stem cells in the testicles can be killed by cancer treatment. Children who are yet to go through puberty can have their sperm samples frozen, but that isn't an option for adults.
In such cases, some clinics have been removing and freezing immature testicle tissue in the hope that it will mature and start making sperm when reimplanted when they are adults. At least one clinic in Belgium has been approved to perform such reimplantation surgery.
The study gives some cause for optimism. Stem cells from rats that had been isolated and frozen for 23 years were used to implant them into the testes of mice.
The mice had been treated with a drug that killed their own sperm-making cells and had defects in their immune systems so they couldn't reject the transplant. In other mice, the same procedure was done with rat cells that had been removed and immediately implanted, as well as with rat cells that had been frozen a few months ago.
The stem cells that were found in the testes of the mice had survived and developed into groups of sperm- producing cells. The groups of cells from the implants were making mature sperm, but each one made about a third as many as the ones derived from fresh or recently frozen cells.
Even if the numbers are low, participants can still produce sperm.
There are some differences between the team's methods and those currently used by fertility clinics, so it is not certain if the results will translate to people.
Clinics are freezing whole tissue samples, while researchers are freezing isolated testicle stem cells. Clinics have to take tissue from children who haven't yet gone through puberty, and they also took the cells from adult rats.
There is a journal reference in the journal.
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