Immature Testicular Tissue Engineered from Weaned Mice to Adults for Prepubertal Fertility Preservation—An In Vivo Translational Study

Abstract

Male pediatric survivors of cancers and bone marrow transplantation often require adjuvant chemoradiation therapy that may be gonadotoxic. The optimal methods to preserve fertility in these prepubertal males are still under investigation. This manuscript presents an in vivo experiment which involved transplantation of immature testicular tissues (ITT) from transgenic donor, to wild-type recipient mice. Donors and recipients were age-mismatched (from 20-week-old donors to 3-week-old recipients, and vice versa) and the transplantation sites involved the abdomen, skin of the head, back muscle, and scrotum. The application of poly-l-lactic acid (PLLA) scaffold was also evaluated in age-matched donors and recipients (both 3-weeks-old). To quantitively evaluate the process of spermatogenesis after ITT transplantation and scaffold application, bioluminescence imaging (BLI) was employed. Our result showed that ITT from 3-week-old mice had the best potential for spermatogenesis, and the optimal transplantation site was in the scrotum. Spermatogenesis was observed in recipient mice up to 51 days after transplantation, and up to the 85th day if scaffold was used. The peak of spermatogenesis occurred between the 42nd and 55th days in the scaffold group. This animal model may serve as a framework for further studies in prepubertal male fertility preservation.