ACRM

Recipient-Donor Matching Process

By: Tamara Ard, RN, Third Party Coordinator, ACRM

Matching recipient patients to egg donors is an important part of my job here at ACRM. I like to meet with all of my recipients face to face to get a feel for what is important to them in finding a donor match. It’s sometimes hard for patients to communicate these things over the phone and often times they don’t really know what to say or questions to ask. I assure them that all of the donors are healthy, and screened prior to the matching process. The first piece of criteria, to narrow the pool, for most couples is ethnicity. Once this is discussed, we move to blood type match. If the recipient couple does not want to disclose that an egg donor was used, the donor must be a blood type match to the couple as well. Then it’s a matter of finding a donor candidate that has similar physical features. Lastly, we try to satisfy any personality traits or level of education the couple feel is important to them.

Here at ACRM, we realize that if given a choice, patients would want to use their own eggs to achieve their family and that this is not always an easy process. By carefully matching recipients individually with donors on a one to one basis, we feel we are giving the patients the next best thing.

Test Tube Sperm

By: Chad Johnson, PhD, HCLD, ACRM

In new research, scientists removed stem cells and cultured sperm in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could lead to new treatments and drugs for men currently unable to have children. The development raises hopes that young boys undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer will still be able to father their own children when they grow up.

The sperm was produced in a test-tube from the cells taken from a newborn mouse testicles and then injected into eggs to produce to twelve healthy babies, four male and eight female, which were all fertile and able to reproduce themselves in adulthood.

Dr Takehiko Ogawa, an urologist at Yokohama City University in Japan, said the production of sperm in the testes is one of the most complex processes in the body. It has never been reproduced in a test tube in mammals before. They achieved the feat by providing most of the cellular components found in the testicles in a dish and watched as the stem cells grew into sperm cells. They then used IVF (in vitro fertilization) techniques to produce male and female offspring that were themselves fertile.

The researchers, whose findings are published in Nature, said: "The obtained sperm resulted in healthy and reproductively competent offspring."

The testes tissue was still worked after being frozen in liquid nitrogen and could still be used several weeks later – suggesting it may be possible in humans to produce their own biological offspring years later.

"In men, this problem can be mitigated by banking sperm before treatment. The solution is less straightforward in prepubescent boys.

"In this scheme, boys would undergo testicular biopsy before chemotherapy or radiation therapy, to obtain tissue for cryopreservation (freezing).

If infertility occurs, the testicular fragments could be thawed and sperm obtained from organ culture for IVF. This could help discover new drugs or treatments to stimulate infertile men to produce more or better sperm. It also may help preserve the fertility of some males.