Male fertility preservation and restoration strategies for patients undergoing gonadotoxic therapies†.

Medical treatments for cancers or other conditions can lead to permanent infertility. Infertility is an insidious disease that impacts not only the ability to have a biological child but also the emotional well-being of the infertile individuals, relationships, finances, and overall health. Therefore, all patients should be educated about the effects of their medical treatments on future fertility and about fertility preservation options. The standard fertility preservation option for adolescent and adult men is sperm cryopreservation. Sperms can be frozen and stored for a long period, thawed at a later date, and used to achieve pregnancy with existing assisted reproductive technologies. However, sperm cryopreservation is not applicable for prepubertal patients who do not yet produce sperm. The only fertility preservation option available to prepubertal boys is testicular tissue cryopreservation. Next-generation technologies are being developed to mature those testicular cells or tissues to produce fertilization-competent sperms. When sperm and testicular tissues are not available for fertility preservation, inducing pluripotent stem cells derived from somatic cells, such as blood or skin, may provide an alternative path to produce sperms through a process call in vitro gametogenesis. This review describes standard and experimental options to preserve male fertility as well as the experimental options to produce functional spermatids or sperms from immature cryopreserved testicular tissues or somatic cells.

Induced pluripotent stem cell line from a mouse model of human azoospermia with a frameshift mutation Tex11_1260Ins(TT).

Infertility is a common disease that impacts 15% of reproductive age couples worldwide, and genetic causes are implicated in about half of those cases. Non-obstructive azoospermia is a severe form of male infertility that features spermatogenic failure resulting in no sperm in the ejaculate and severely reduces the chance to have biological children. We created a Tex11_1260Ins(TT) (1260GATA â†’ TTGGTA) mutant mouse that models the Tex11_1258(TT) mutation identified from a patient with nonobstructive azoospermia. The Tex11_1260Ins(TT) iPSC cells displayed characteristics of pluripotent-like morphology, expressed pluripotent protein markers, show normal karyotype, and can to differentiate into tissues of the three germ layers.