Lab-Grown Sperm Successfully Creates Human Embryos in Fertility Breakthrough

Revolutionary Scientific Achievement

A Utah-based biotech firm, aided by the Mayo Clinic, announced this week that it has successfully grown mature sperm, ready to swim, out of spermatogonial stem cells in the lab . Paterna Biosciences has already successfully tested its lab-grown sperm in the generation of healthy-looking human embryos . The company successfully grew functional human sperm from their starting cells, entirely outside the human body, and then proved they work .

According to Baylor College urologist Larry Lipshultz, who commented on the research as an outside expert, "This is huge. People didn't understand, or had never figured out, what growth factors you have to supply to these cells to get them to become mature sperm. Apparently, they've identified these substances" . Paterna's cofounder Alexander Pastuszak has described the firm's work as the first major innovation in this field since the dawn of intracytoplasmic sperm injection over 30 years ago .

Producing human sperm in vitro has been a major scientific challenge. A Japanese team first produced viable mouse sperm in 2011, but translating the process to humans has proven far more complex. A French company, Kallistem, claimed success in 2015, but outside experts questioned whether the sperm were fully developed .

Addressing a Critical Medical Need

More than one in eight American men between the ages of 25 and 49 experience some form of infertility today . Roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of infertile men produce no sperm at all, leaving them with few or no options for biological parenthood. For now, the only option for these men is an invasive surgical retrieval procedure that often fails to locate viable sperm .

Male infertility care lags 30 years behind in vitro fertilization-focused female treatment. There is currently no effective, FDA-approved therapeutic for male infertility . As Pastuszak explained, "As a physician, I've sat across from far too many men and their partners and told them there's nothing more medicine can do: no sperm, poor sperm quality, repeated IVF failures. For millions of families around the world, those words are devastating" .

Paterna believes its technique could bypass that barrier by recreating a healthy developmental environment in the lab. The company says it has generated sperm from dozens of tissue samples and aims to produce thousands of sperm from a single biopsy .

Safety and Validation Concerns

Paterna Biosciences' possible breakthrough has not yet vetted its findings via the publication of this new research in a peer-reviewed journal or an outside review. The findings have not been peer-reviewed, independently replicated, or cleared for any clinical use . That caveat matters because at least one other biotech company has already prematurely claimed success developing sperm in the lab, only to have those results challenged by outside experts in 2015 .

Paterna is planning rigorous testing. They will compare embryos made from natural sperm against those made from their lab-grown sperm to check for abnormalities. "That will actually tell us a ton regarding the efficacy and safety of the approach. It will tell us if there are any mutations that are created by the in vitro process," Pastuszak tells Wired .

Nevertheless, Paterna Biosciences enjoys a pedigree that should bolster some confidence: The firm was among ten life science companies accepted last year into the MedTech Accelerator program jointly run by the Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University, which awarded the company its Disruption Award .

Cost and Future Prospects

The company said it expects the procedure will cost between $5,000 and $12,000, a lot of cash but cheaper than the $15,000 to $30,000 typically charged for a single cycle of traditional in vitro fertilization . Fertility treatments in the U.S. are rarely covered by insurance, and experts note that cost remains one of the biggest barriers in fertility care .

Paterna's projected timeline—with potential pregnancy-initiation trials as soon as next year—is far faster than what many reproductive scientists have previously considered feasible . The technology could fundamentally change how we approach male fertility treatment, offering hope to millions of couples who previously had no viable options for biological parenthood. As the science progresses through clinical trials, this breakthrough may represent the beginning of a new era in reproductive medicine.