Dr. Bastuba explains extensive research being conducted for males that do not make any sperm.
Dr. Bastuba:
Well there are varying levels of sperm production. It takes a certain amount of sperm production to have any sperm in the ejaculate, that is the fluid coming out of the top of the penis. In males with very low sperm production we can find sperm inside the testicles and that sperm is only useful for in vitro fertilization, but unfortunately about two percent of males in the population don’t make any sperm, and so this group of patients is more difficult to treat.
Those patients typically have something called Sertoli cell-only syndrome, a more proper term for it would be germinal cell aplasia and that means that they do not have any of those stem cells inside the testicle that are the sperm producing cells. And so, instead of having only a few sperms that we can go inside the testicle and find, these males have no sperm.
To treat them, science currently is using some of the techniques that you hear about in the newspapers and one of the most intriguing of those techniques is actually taking a somatic cell. These aren’t germ cells. Germ cells are sperm cells and oocytes, the cells that are typically the ones used to bring about a pregnancy and to help keep our whole species alive. Those cells are very specialized cells. They have only half of the genetic content of a normal cell in our body and that’s why when a sperm and an egg come together, now we have those 46 chromosomes again. Before they only had 23 a piece, they combine.