Grant: Project Grant

Recent research progress has made many types of cancer curable. This development led to a new situation where the post-cancer quality of life became a significant concern for cancer patients. Preservation of the ability to have children draws a particular interest in the patients, and their partners and families. For male patients, the only approach to protect their fertility is currently sperm banking. This approach, however, is not applicable to boys before puberty. Thus, childhood cancer patients face a significant risk of infertility, long before they are ready to make decisions about childbearing and household formation, which also places burdens on their parents. An emerging concept of therapeutic approach to this problem is based on sperm-making stem cells. These cells continuously produce millions of sperm everyday throughout life after puberty. Although sperm production is not fully functional in prepubertal boys, these sperm-producing stem cells do exist from the time of birth. Thus, these cells can be harvested and freeze-stored before cancer therapy, and transplanted back to the patients afterwards when they are ready to form a family. This scheme has been feasible and routinely operational in mice; yet, research on sperm-producing stem cells in humans has seen only a very limited extent of progress. The proposed research addresses the key elements that have been the obstacle to the advancement of our knowledge about sperm-producing stem cells in humans and technical development for their clinical use - what are the cells' markers and how can we amplify these cells?