Turbo-charged robotic sperm could be the future of treating infertility, according to scientists.
By coating the fast-moving sperm cells with magnetic particles, the researchers said they can be tracked and steered for the first time – and one day allow them to deliver life-saving medicine to areas of the female reproductive system that are hard to access.
It’s unclear what drugs may be used this way or when it could happen, but medicine can be loaded directly into the sperm cells that would serve as vehicles to reach organs, such as the uterus or fallopian tubes.
The researchers say using them like this could help treat infertility-causing conditions affecting millions of American women, including uterine cancer, endometriosis, and uterine fibroids. Uterine cancer can be fatal when left untreated and there were more than 13,000 deaths from the disease in 2023.
Right now, doctors aren’t able to fight these conditions using treatments that focus on certain parts of the body.
The breakthrough could also offer a closer look into the body during fertilization, the researchers said.
For example, tracking sperm movement inside the female reproductive system could help understand sperm transport mechanisms and unexplained infertility. It may even improve lab-based fertilization techniques such as IVF, they said. IVF leads to the births of tens of thousands of babies in the U.S.
It’s unclear how that process might be improved but tests showed that they could be promising candidates for future research, the scientists said.
More work is needed before any clinical trials can begin, but the sperm bots were not toxic to cells in the uterus even after three days of exposure.
The key to all of this lies in the magnetic coating.
While sperm cells are usually nearly impossible to see inside humans using X-rays, the coating makes them visible and able to move by responding to external magnetic fields.
“Until now, visualizing sperm inside the body was nearly impossible,” Islam Khalil, a researcher at the Netherlands-based University of Twente, said in a statement.
