In an effort to give a sick boy an option to have children in the future, UK doctors embarked on a landmark procedure: freezing a part of his testicular tissue.
Nathan Crawford, 9, of Bude, Cornwall, suffered from frequent headaches and blurred vision early this year. What his stepfather Jonathan Alison and mother Donna Hunt was caused by hours of gaming turned out to be a benign tumor known as glioma, wherein the mass was growing in glial tissue of the nervous system.
Normally, it is treated with surgery to remove the tumor, but his was found close to an important brain tissue. Thus, the remaining options were radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
But according to Cancer Research UK, these procedures can possibly affect Nathan's fertility as the drugs can alter the way his sperm would fertilize the egg or he may be less capable to produce sperm.
As a precaution, doctors in Oxford's Radcliffe Hospital performed the world's first cryopreservation of testicular tissues, which they obtained through a keyhole surgery that lasted for only less than an hour. Prior to this surgery, the procedure was tested on animal models with only a few days of freezing before thawing.
Although the most common option for men is to use a sperm bank, children as young as Nathan does not produce mature sperm. His testicular tissues contain stem cells, which can be grown to become mature sperm should he become infertile but decide to have children in the future.
In common cryopreservation methods, the collected samples are stored in subzero temperatures in an environment-controlled lab. They are obtained once the owner is ready to use them, which may be many years after storage.
There is not enough data to know how long the testicular tissue can be effectively stored, although for sperm, the ideal period is 12 years.