What is CHIP Fertile® for sperm selection?

The Fertile® Chip is a device patented by Harvard University Medical School & Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It has been designed to make the best possible sperm selection. It uses microfluidic technology to isolate the best sperm in the closest way to how it works naturally.

What is the Fertile® Chip?

The design basically consists of two chambers connected by a microchannel. Each Chip is made up of five microchannels to increase the amount of spermatozoa recovered. The microchannels and the two chambers, the inlet and the outlet, are filled with culture medium. The semen is deposited in the chamber of origin and, half an hour later, the spermatozoa that have reached the final chamber are recovered.

The design is designed to prevent abnormal or impaired spermatozoa from reaching the end. The spermatozoa with alterations will collide with the walls of the microchannel and slow down their movement. We will only recover sperm with good mobility

What is the advantage of this selection method?

This selection method avoids the traditional centrifugation that the classical methods apply. Centrifugations are harmful to sperm because all the sperm are concentrated at the bottom of the tube. This causes the membranes of the spermatozoa to be altered and the sperm DNA to be damaged by oxidation mechanisms.

In patients showing double-stranded DNA fragmentation (cause of abortion), this screening method has proven to be the most effective in reducing fragmented sperm in the final sample.