Project 01 · 2019–2021 · Completed

Studying how sperm
actually swim.

MicroFSMA (Microfluidic based platform for SeMen Analysis) put sperm on a chip built to mimic the female reproductive tract, so swimming behaviour could be watched and measured directly, cell by cell, instead of inferred.

State of the art

Motility, measured where it matters.

Sperm motility is the main test clinicians use to diagnose male infertility, scored either by eye against the World Health Organization's protocol or by commercial Computer Assisted Semen Analysis (CASA) systems1. Both methods watch sperm swim in a plain dish, an environment nothing like the tract the cells actually navigate to reach the egg, guided there by chemotaxis, thermotaxis, and rheotaxis2.

Manual scoring is also slow3, and CASA results can shift when the same sample is re-screened4. Microfluidic chips offered a fix already proven in pieces: microchannels can track sperm motility as reliably as CASA5, and separately, other groups had used chips to study how sperm respond to chemical6 and thermal7 gradients. No one had put a standardised, user-friendly platform to work studying flow-driven swimming itself.

Inlet Outlet Hydrostatic height difference Sperm swims upstream (rheotaxis)
Two reservoirs at different heights create a steady hydrostatic-pressure-driven flow through the chip. MicroFSMA filmed how sperm cells swim against that flow, upstream toward the inlet.
Project insight

A chip built to watch sperm swim.

MicroFSMA deployed a microfluidic chip carrying a hydrostatic-pressure-driven flow, the tract's rheotaxis cue, then filmed and tracked how sperm actually move against it.

Hydrostatic-pressure flow

A height difference between reservoirs drives a controlled flow through the chip, the rheotaxis cue sperm swim against in the tract.

Automated tracking

A computer program follows sperm heads and flagella across time-lapse footage, cell by cell.

Quantitative kinematics

Linking positions frame to frame turns swimming behaviour into hard numbers on motility and kinematics.

Innovation

Why the chip changes the read-out.

Left alone in a dish, a sperm cell swims a straight line with a symmetrical flagellar beat. Put it in a channel against a hydrostatic-pressure-driven flow, the rheotaxis cue sperm meet throughout the female tract, and a responsive cell switches to an asymmetric beat and traces a helical path upstream. Seeing that shift at all requires studying the cell somewhere the flow exists, which a plain dish never provides. MicroFSMA built exactly that:

  • A microfluidic chip generating a controlled, hydrostatic-pressure-driven flow, not a generic static dish.
  • A computational framework tracking multiple sperm heads and flagella across recorded time-lapse footage.
  • New, behaviour-based parameters for semen assessment, aimed at cutting the failure risk that poor sperm selection carries into IVF.
iProject info
Period
2019–2021
Programme
H2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
Topic
H2020-MSCA-IF-2018
Project ID
842299
Agency
European Commission
Keywords
Rheotaxis, hydrostatic-pressure flow, microfluidics, semen analysis
Rheotaxis
Dr. Shiva Kant ShuklaDr. Shiva Kant ShuklaFellow & Principal Investigator
Outcome

A fellowship that became a company.

MicroFSMA's real outcome went beyond its papers and its measurement platform: it led directly to the founding of Beezbiotech SAS in Rennes in 2021, at the close of the fellowship. An MSCA Individual Fellowship spinning out into a company is rare; most end with a publication, not a business. Getting there took Dr. Shiva Kant Shukla carrying the work single-handedly, from research to prototype to company, turning what looked like an impossible task into a working one.

Dissemination

Hosted by Cherry Biotech.

Given the ethical significance of the field, MicroFSMA's results were shared with the wider community through selected magazine articles and a dedicated symposium at a scientific festival, alongside the usual academic channels.

Funded by the European Union

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 842299.

References

Sources cited above.

  1. World Health Organization. WHO Laboratory Manual for the Examination and Processing of Human Semen, 5th ed. Geneva: WHO (2010).
  2. Suarez, S. S. & Pacey, A. A. Sperm transport in the female reproductive tract. Hum. Reprod. Update 12, 23–37 (2006).
  3. Talarczyk-Desole, J. et al. Manual vs. computer-assisted sperm analysis: can CASA replace manual assessment of human semen in clinical practice? Ginekol. Pol. 88, 56–60 (2017).
  4. Broekhuijse, M. L. W. J. et al. Additional value of computer assisted semen analysis (CASA) compared to conventional motility assessments in pig artificial insemination. Theriogenology 76, 1473–1486 (2011).
  5. Shiva, K. S. et al. Automated analysis of rat sperm motility in microchannels. Biomed. Phys. Eng. Express 4, 035013 (2018).
  6. Bhagwat, S. et al. Chemotactic behavior of spermatozoa captured using a microfluidic chip. Biomicrofluidics 12, 024112 (2018).
  7. Bahat, A. & Eisenbach, M. Sperm thermotaxis. Mol. Cell. Endocrinol. 252, 115–119 (2006).
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