In a significant milestone, scientists at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University successfully grew the world’s first pair of “laboratory testicles” while attempting to alleviate male infertility, which affects 10% to 15% of men in the United States.
Scientists have created small, artificial organs using cells derived from mouse testes. According to reports, the organs look and function like real mouse testicles.
The researchers, led by Dr. Nitzan Gonen, hoped to create human-like testicles from human stem cells, which could aid in the treatment of infertility and developmental sexual abnormalities.
“Fertility clinics are able to identify some of the problems that cause male infertility — a low sperm count or an abnormal structure — but we don’t understand fully what causes this, which genome mutations led to the condition, or what went wrong in the testicle’s functioning, as a result of which the tubes do not carry the sperm well,” said Gonen, while speaking to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week.
“Now it will be possible to study these subjects within the system of the model we have produced,” she said.
A step ahead of the organoids!
Biologists have already created organoids from stem cells that look like kidneys, brains, and intestines.
Gonen’s team developed organoids by culturing immature testicular cells from neonatal mice.
The researchers discovered that the treatment was successful when they detected tubule-like structures and cellular organization that resembled those found in vivo testis.
According to the paper, the artificial mouse testicles functioned properly for nine weeks, which is considered adequate time for sperm creation and release in a mouse. The process takes around 34.5 days.
The testicles have two basic functions: testosterone synthesis and storage, production, and maturation of sperm cells.
According to the study’s findings, which were recently published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences, the scientists emphasized that their organoids demonstrated “signs of entry into meiosis,” the process by which the number of chromosomes is reduced by half to generate sperm cells.