📋 Tender Overview
Children with cancer who receive aggressive chemotherapy may lose their future fertility. Preserving fertility among these children and treating infertile men due to testicle defects are issues that concern many researchers around the world. Now a research group led by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in collaboration with a research group at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology has succeeded in creating an innovative platform that improves the process of creating sperm in a laboratory through a microfluidic system using a silicon chip PDMS. Prof. Mahmoud Huleihel from the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology Immunology and Genetics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev considered the need to find a method of producing sperm cells in the laboratory so that it bypasses limitations such as the potential return of cancer cells to the patients body. Young mice that do not yet produce sperm cells are a model that imitates the growth of sperm cells in the testicle. Under laboratory conditions it was possible to develop a procedure for culturing testicular cells in an environment very close to the natural environment in terms of the structure of the sperm tubes and the cells that make them up. Using a special chip designed for the study a complete 3D system was built containing microfluidic channels that allow the addition of growth factors cells from the testicles or any other cells from the tissues of the body. The innovative system was successfully tested using young mice which contain primary germ cells that develop to form sperm and supporting testicular cells. The long-term culture was tested and after 5-7 weeks seminiferous tube-like structures containing advanced-stage cells ROUND SPERMATID in the process of sperm formation were observed. Now the research group is preparing for the next phase of applying the experiment to cells from humans. This study opens up a new horizon in the process of creating sperm cells in a culture says Prof. Huleihel. It enables the implementation of microfluidic-based technologies in future therapeutic strategies for infertile men and in the preservation of fertility for children undergoing aggressive chemotherapyradiotherapy treatments that may impair their fertility in puberty. In addition this system may also serve as an innovative platform for examining the effect of drugs and toxins on male fertility. The research group included Prof. Emeritus Eitan Lunenfeld from the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Soroka Medical Center currently a senior faculty member at Ariel University and Prof. Gilad Yossifon from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion currently a faculty member from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Tel Aviv University. The research was led by Ph.D. students Ali AbuMadighem from the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology Immunology and Genetics Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Sholom Shuchat from the Department of Mechanical Engineering Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. This study No. 342520 was supported by the Israel Science Foundation ISF and in collaboration with the Chinese Foundation for Natural Sciences NSFC ISF-NSFC the Reproduction Hub at the Faculty of Health Sciences Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Council for Higher Education Scholarships for outstanding Ph.D. students from the Ultra-Orthodox and Arab populations. This development is based on a registered patent owned by BGN TECHNOLOGIES the universitys tech transfer company.
