IVF breakthrough by Irish team gives hope to childless couples

RESEARCHERS at the University of Limerick have made a major breakthrough to help couples with infertility problems to start a family.

The team has developed a new technology that can select a better quality sperm to be used.

‘Infertility problems have been driven by increasing maternal age as well as by the halving of sperm counts over the last 40 years,’ said Dr Seán Fair, reproductive biologist and project lead at the university.

The most common fertility treatment couples undergo is in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and despite advances in IVF over the last 40 years, two out of three cycles fail, resulting in financial and emotional pain for couples.

‘While little can be done to improve the number or quality of women’s eggs, men normally produce tens of millions of sperm, yet only one is required to fertilise an egg. Despite the large number of sperm produced by men, very few are normal,’ he explained.

One in six couples have fertility problems and the technology developed by the scientists in Limerick uses microfluidics to mimic the journey sperm would travel in the female reproductive tract, thereby selecting the fittest and most functional sperm, which can then be used in IVF to improve outcomes.

Working with fertility clinics, the team have demonstrated that the selected sperm have significantly better DNA integrity than that selected currently.

‘Women whose male partners have poor sperm DNA integrity are twice as likely to have a miscarriage and therefore by selecting only sperm with intact DNA the risk of miscarriage can be significantly reduced,’ said Dr Fair.

‘Sperm naturally swim up the female reproductive tract on their way to meet the egg in the fallopian tube and en route they must swim against an outward flow of mucus that is secreted around the time of ovulation. This means that only the fittest sperm reach the egg,’ he said.

‘The technology developed at University of Limerick replicates this journey on a micro-device so that sperm swim against an active fluid flow within micro-channels, mimicking what happens naturally.

‘The fittest sperm are then selected for use in fertility treatment,’ he said.

‘It is the result of over five years of painstaking work by the UL team as they have optimised the architecture of the micro-device and fluid flow profiles to ensure that only the best quality sperm are selected.

‘The team are now working on further clinical validation of the technology after which regulatory approval will be sought,’ he added.

The research is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Dr Fair and his team.

They include Karen Browne, the commercial lead; Dr David Newport, fluidics engineer, Professor Leonard O’Sullivan and Dr Eoin White, product design, as well as with local fertility clinics.

One in six have fertility trouble