Infertility

The discovery that cells which behave like ESCs can now be obtained from adult mice may now open up the possibility of a similar “ethical” source from grown men.

“We’re in the process of doing this in humans, and we’re optimistic,” says Gerd Hasenfuss of the Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany, and head of the team which pioneered the breakthrough.

Tissue choice Hasenfuss and his colleagues first extracted spermatagonial stem cells from adult mouse testes, before growing them in the lab in a special mixture of growth factors and nutrients which coaxed the cells into becoming ESC-like cells instead of sperm.

“We can turn these into all kinds of tissue, from beating cardiac and vascular cells to neurons, skin cells and liver cells,” says Hasenfuss.

And the process worked in 27% of the mice they experimented on.

Although the cells behaved like ESCs in tests, the team have decided to call them “multipotent adult germline stem cells” to distinguish them from their embryonically-derived counterparts.

“I think it will solve the ethical problem if you can generate cells from adult humans,” says Hasenfuss.

He told New Scientist that his team is already taking testicle-tissue samples under consent from patients undergoing operations for oth...

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