I-Corps: Microfluidic Corralling Technology for Progressive Sperm Separation

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of sperm separation technology to improve the conventional assisted reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which suffer from lack of efficiency (30-40%) efficiency. The global IVF market size was valued at around $18.3 billion in 2019 and is expected to rise to $37.7 billion by 2027. This growth is expected based on the growth of infertility during the last decade. Therefore, the demands for IVF treatments and including sperm separation utilities are increasing as well. Moreover, gamete treatments are considered crucial towards the modification of the whole IVF process, and extraction of the sperm with the best quality increasingly attracts interest. Although the current methods are able to extract sperm with the purity of 30 to 40%, the control on sperm motility is missing. In addition, traditional methods are time and labor-intensive, and their natural need for external force makes them hazardous to the DNA content of the sperm. The proposed project will explore translation of a microfluidic platform for sperm separation.This I-Corps project will optimize the key step of the IVF microfluidics platform, which is sperm selection. Ultimately, the goal is to minimize gamete manipulation and costs associated with IVF to improve gamete treatment and fertilization success. The proposed microfluidic technology is a passive and efficient way to separate motile and healthy sperm from dead and abnormal cells so that the separated sample exhibits 100% motility. Moreover, the control over the motility of the separated sperm in this technology makes it suitable for gamete treatment purposes, which is desired by IVF clinicians. The proposed design is a microchamber-based microfluidic platform that may separate progressive motile sperm from nonviable sperm and debris as well as trapped nonprogressive sperm in the microchambers. The platform is operated in a short period of time (10 min), without any prior sample preparation. This microfluidic platform may provide a facile solution for high-throughput collection of progressive sperm useful for assisted reproductive technologies while still benefiting from micron-scale physics that makes it suitable for fundamental research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.