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Men diagnosed with cancer have the option to freeze their sperm before chemotherapy, which can make them sterile.
However, sperm freezing is not an option for prepubertal boys, 30% of whom will become infertile as a result of toxic anti-cancer treatments.
Scientists have been working on this problem for years: the idea is to harvest and cryopreserve immature testicular tissue prior to chemotherapy or radiation therapy, and then transplant it into adolescence to produce a fertile sperm for the first time. puberty.
Three experiments on monkeys since the 2000s have successfully demonstrated that the production of sperm, or spermatogenesis, was possible through this autograft.
But none had resulted in the conception and birth of a baby, until now.
A team led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh's Faculty of Medicine announced Thursday that it has taken a breakthrough in using sperm collected from a male rhesus macaque to generate embryos that have been transferred to recipient females.
In April 2018, one of the women gave birth to a healthy baby named Grady, a coat rack made up of "graft derivatives" and "baby".
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published in the journal Science.
The experiment represents a successful proof of concept for the technique and brings it closer to reality for boys with cancer. For girls, further research will be needed on ovarian tissue transplantation.
In Pittsburgh, 206 boys and 41 girls treated for cancer have had their tissues frozen since 2011 in the hope that the technique will one day become available, said lead author of the study, Kyle Orwig, Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.
"I think we will have this technology at the clinic in the next two to five years," he said, adding that discussions were already under way with the regulators.
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Methodology
During his reporting, AFP noted differences in the stated methodologies, which Science publishers indicated to evaluate in the event that a correction is needed.
The five macaques in the experiment underwent chemotherapy, but the treatment did not make them infertile, said Orwig.
Their sterility at the time of the experiment is rather due to castration, standard procedure for this type of studies, according to the authors.
But if the chemotherapy treatment was not mentioned in the study published by Science, it was highlighted in interviews and a video produced by the university, which could give the impression that primates became sterile because of the anticancer treatment.
Orwig attributed this discrepancy to human error. "I had forgotten that we had decided not to mention the chemo in the article because we thought that it had no relevance to the experimental design and had no impact on the result, "he said.
Stefan Schlatt, professor at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Andrology of Munster, Germany, who wrote an editorial on the study for science, agreed with Orwig.
"It is indeed irrelevant," he said, because the purpose of this test was to show that the testicle could develop extra-uterine, which was the case.
"However, it would have been more honest and scientifically correct to mention all the treatments in the manuscript," he added.
In a comment to AFP, Science said its editors were not aware of the chemotherapy experiment, while adding that it was usual for experimental design to evolve.
"An author determines what elements are needed to bring clarity and transparency to the methods used to produce the results and conclusions," he continued, adding that he would badess whether a correction was necessary.
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