I-Corps: Microfluidic Corralling Technology for Progressive Sperm Separation

I-Corps项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是精子分离技术的发展，以改进传统的辅助生殖技术，如体外受精（IVF）和胞浆内单精子注射（ICSI），这些技术缺乏效率（30-40%）。2019年，全球试管婴儿市场规模约为183亿美元，预计到2027年将增至377亿美元。这一增长是根据过去十年不孕症的增长预测的。因此，对体外受精治疗和包括精子分离公用事业的需求也在增加。此外，配子处理被认为对整个体外受精过程的修改至关重要，提取质量最好的精子越来越引起人们的兴趣。虽然目前的方法能够提取纯度为30 - 40%的精子，但缺乏对精子活力的控制。此外，传统方法耗时费力，而且需要外力，对精子的DNA含量有危害。该项目将探索用于精子分离的微流体平台的翻译。这个I-Corps项目将优化试管婴儿微流体平台的关键步骤，即精子选择。最终，目标是尽量减少配子操作和与试管婴儿相关的成本，以提高配子治疗和受精成功率。所提出的微流控技术是一种被动、高效的方法，可以从死亡和异常细胞中分离出有活力的健康精子，使分离出来的样本具有100%的活力。此外，该技术对分离精子运动的控制使其适合配子治疗目的，这是IVF临床医生所希望的。所提出的设计是一种基于微室的微流控平台，它可以将前进的运动精子与不可存活的精子和碎片以及被困在微室中的非前进精子分离开来。平台在很短的时间内（10分钟）运行，没有任何事先的样品制备。这种微流控平台可以为辅助生殖技术中有用的高通量渐进精子收集提供简单的解决方案，同时仍然受益于微米尺度的物理学，使其适合基础研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.