A healthy baby born two weeks ago to a Bay Area couple now gives hope to thousands of men who have been ruled out as potential fathers because they were told they possessed "dead" sperm.

The birth is the first reported success nationwide resulting from a new test developed by fertility specialists at UCSF. The story was featured earlier today on ABC’s Good Morning America. The new test determines if a non-moving sperm is "alive" rather than "dead" and capable of initiating pregnancy through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Until now, all non-moving sperm were considered ineffective for IVF procedures, the medical name for fertilization that takes place outside the human body.

The Parks family

"The birth of my son is quite honestly the happiest moment of my life," says Mike Parks, 47, who is a medical pioneer. David Franklin Parks, named after both of his grandfathers, was born on June 10. He weighed 6 pounds, 4 ounces and was 20 inches long. Mike and Marie, 37, had been trying to have a baby for more than 10 years, and they were told by many doctors that they had no hope of ever having a child.

"Traditionally, sperm motility has been the most widely accepted measure of sperm health," says UCSF male fertility specialist Paul Turek, MD, assistant professor of urology. "This belief until now has excluded sperm that may be alive and healthy but not moving."

About 15 percent of American couples have trouble conceiving a child, Turek says, and of this group, about 40 percent have a problem that is male related. About half of these men have abnormalities of sperm, including low counts, abnormal shape and poor movement.

Turek, who is the director of the UCSF Male Infertility Clinic and Laboratory, used a physiologic principle called hypo-osmotic swelling (HOS) to develop a test to find living sperm among those thought to be dead. A research article about the effectiveness of Turek's HOS test is published in the June 1997 issue of the scientific journal Molecular Reproduction and Development. Co-author of the study is Colin Smikle, MD, a fellow in reproductive endocrinology at the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.

In the past, men with non-moving sperm were left out of fertility treatments because "there was no way to tell whether the sperm were alive or dead," Turek says. Applying the HOS test, Turek exposed non-moving testicular sperm to a diluted sugar solution and was able to determine which sperm were alive. The living sperm absorbed water and swelled, while dead or damaged sperm did not.

As a result, UCSF specialists were able to select an individual, living, non-moving sperm and inject it directly into the center of a human egg -- a method known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Though fertility specialists have used ICSI since 1992, until now the procedure has focused on moving sperm, and men whose sperm showed "no sign of life" were excluded, Turek says.

"HOS can accurately detect living ejaculated and testicular sperm in a population of non-moving, but not necessarily dead, sperm," he adds. The ICSI procedure is used along with the process of IVF. IVF begins with the female partner, who undergoes daily administration of fertility drugs to stimulate eggs to mature. These eggs are then removed from the ovaries and incubated under very precise conditions in an IVF laboratory. Fertilization is attempted in more than one egg, and successful fertilization usually occurs in 12 to 16 hours. In most cases, two or more fertilized eggs are returned to the woman's uterus as a method of increasing the odds that at least one will implant in the uterine lining and pregnancy will occur.

After nearly giving up on parenting, the Parks came to the UCSF IVF Program three years ago for fertility treatment on the recommendation of Mike's long-time personal doctor. Their IVF attempt resulted in the recovery of 11 eggs, seven of which were fertilized by ICSI using Mike's non-moving, healthy sperm identified by the HOS test. Five embryos were frozen, and two embryos were returned to Marie's uterus but failed to implant. A second try, using three of the frozen embryos, also failed. The third time was the charm -- out of the two remaining frozen embryos, one successfully implanted and Marie became pregnant.

"We have been on an emotional roller coaster for the past 10 years," Marie says. "To succeed at anything you must also face failure and disappointment, which we did so often. But we never gave up, and now we have a happy, healthy baby."

By Rebecca Higbee

1st appeared 6/26/97