GENTLEMEN, ever been curious about your sperm count? If so, a home fertility test could be just the thing.
Loes Segerink and colleagues at the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, have developed a 10-centimetre-long 鈥渓ab-on-a-chip鈥� which could determine fertility in a matter of seconds. While undeniably useful, such kits also raise the ethical issue of whether diagnosis without the professional advice that normally accompanies it could do more harm than good.
Male fertility analysis can be embarrassing for the person in question and time consuming for medical staff. The ejaculate must be submitted for analysis within an hour 鈥� which generally precludes men from producing the sample at home 鈥� and once submitted, a lengthy manual count remains the 鈥済old standard鈥� for spermatozoa concentration analysis.
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鈥淲ith our system we overcome these problems,鈥� Segerink says. Their microfluidic chip contains a tiny channel through which the spermatozoa are drawn by pressure flow. The sample is first doped with a known concentration of polystyrene beads, and as beads and cells are drawn along the channel they pass between two electrodes, altering the electrical impedance. The chip tallies the electrical perturbations due to the beads and cells, and comparing bead concentration to that of the spermatozoa provides the sperm count (Lab on a Chip, in press).
Segerink says the chip could take just 12 seconds to determine sperm concentration with the same measurement error as a manual count. But while she stresses that the chip would be used as part of hospital-run fertility treatment, it could be adapted to produce a cheap and easy-to-use version for self-diagnosis at home.
Michael Dunn, a healthcare ethics researcher at the University of Oxford, says this is a concern. 鈥淭here would be the potential for harm to be caused to patients if they were not provided with the relevant information about the impact of a positive result for infertility,鈥� he says.
鈥淪elf-diagnosis could be harmful if the patient does not understand the impact of a positive result鈥�
As other research teams develop similar devices, this is becoming an increasingly important issue. Hywel Morgan and colleagues at the University of Southampton in the UK are developing microfluidic chips that could help diagnose conditions from viral infection to anaemia using a pinprick of blood. 鈥淒evices of this nature allow you to distribute healthcare into the community,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut if you鈥檙e diagnosing disease, the answers you鈥檙e providing have to be handled appropriately.鈥�
鈥淓ven if the technology is ready for the marketplace,鈥� says Morgan, 鈥渨hether society is ready to use it is an issue.鈥�
