A leading fertility expert plans to produce human sperm using mice.

Roger Short, of the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, hopes to transplant the germ cells that develop into sperm from human testes into a mouse.

Often male infertility is due to a genetic fault in the Sertoli cells that nurture developing sperm. The ultimate aim would be to use a mouse's healthy Sertoli cells to enable human sperm to mature.

"Human sperm" from mice could get mouse diseases

It is possible, however, that human sperm developed in a mouse's testes might develop genetic problems or be infected by mouse viruses.

The law in Britain forbids the mixing of animal and human reproductive cells and the insertion of a human embryo into an animal, but because this technique would involve unformed germ cells which have not yet developed into sperm, it may not be covered.

Short believes that the work could ultimately help make it possible to correct the genetic defects that can disrupt normal sperm production, but this would require altering genes in the human germ line, which for the moment is out of the question.

The proposal was inspired by a 1996 paper published in Nature by a team at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, which showed that rat germ cells could produce mature sperm after being injected into the testes of mice with defective immune systems.

Short now intends to repeat the rat-to-mouse experiment to see whether the sperm produced can fertilise a rat egg. He then aims to transplant human cells.
 

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