The present sperm sorting chip utilities the upstream swim characteristic of sperms in appropriate fluid velocity to achieve up to 80 high motility sperm yield for infertile males in just 40 minutes

We developed a new type of microfluidic chip with utilizing the characteristic of sperm anadromous instinct for high-throughput sperm separation. The process can be finished in 10 min, which is 10 times faster than the conventional design. Experiment reveals that the qualified sperm motility was raised up from 30 to 99linearity (LIN) up from 0.2 to 0.85 via sorting by our microfluidic chip.

Infertility is a serious globe issue, especially in the developed countries, over 20%infertile male has sperm problems, that include instance immotile, abnormal morphology and low sperm quantity. Therefore, how to isolate high quality sperm for clinical use is extremely required. Up to date, activity sperm sorting is usually using Swiming-up and Density gradient centrifugation approaches. Unfortunately, both methods are detrimental to the sperm viability and elicits production of reactive oxygen species. Separation sperm by microfluidics has been put emphasis on and studied; however, it faced some challenge such as low throughput and an unacceptable recover rate.

The microfluidic chips have been used to sort human motile sperms based on the phenomena of laminar flow. The sorted sperms would be fertilized to form the embryo by using in intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). The prototype of chips have been developed in the lab under National Tsing Hua University. Furthermore, the mass production has been conducted by Ritek to accomplish the disposable chips