Collecting and freezing testicular tissue is one of the fertility preservation techniques available to preserve the possibility of having a child in the future. The prepubertal boys with cancerare particularly concerned by this technique because chemotherapy is potentially toxic for their reproductive system but it is not possible to collect mature sperm. It is therefore proposed to remove and freeze testicular tissue.
As the National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm) explains, “The objective is to use these tissue samples to achieve in vitro maturation of the immature germ cells they contain. Another possibility is to reimplant the tissue taken at the end of the toxic treatment”.
A 9-year-old British boy suffering from a brain tumor has thus become the first boy in Britain to benefit from testicular tissue freezing in the hope of having children when he is an adult. This operation is still experimental and no child has yet been born from frozen testicular tissue. But it is similar to the” autologous ovarian tissue transplant, which has already enabled one in three transplanted women to become pregnant.
During the surgery, performed under general anesthesia, surgeons removed a piece of testicular tissue from one of the young boy’s testicles containing sperm stem cells. The operation lasted about 30 minutes and the child was back home two days later.
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