Helping families grow and preserving species in danger of extinction

Strong sperm - Fertiliy conceptWhenever friends ask me what I do for a living and I answer: “analyze sperm”, their first reaction is amusing. Some of them just smirk a little bit while others laugh loudly. However, when I go into detail about what we do at Microptic I notice that their interest grows. Many of them are unaware that sperm can be analyzed in the first place and those who do know never realized how complex of a world it really is. They ask: “but I thought you were a computer engineer?” My answer is “yes, that’s what I am”, but I explain that by programming using artificial vision technology, we help couples who dream of becoming parents through a simple and painless sperm quality test. This is when people realize the social aspect of my work; they see that thanks to this test many couples become parents and that others do not have to spend money on assisted reproduction techniques just because their sperm quality is insufficient.

Today, many centers for assisted reproduction use ICSI (a technique where a single sperm is injected directly into an egg) as a first test, the most expensive for patients but not always the most effective. If sperm quality analysis was the starting point in assisting patients having trouble conceiving, a wide range of more efficient and not so expensive techniques would be available. When people realize that an endangered species can be preserved through animal sperm analysis, or that changes in the environment affect reproductive ability their initial preconceptions about sperm analysis radically change.

Each day we hear more and more about seminal quality and it’s because statistics predict a bleak future. Industrialization and changes in lifestyle (associated with stress), climate change and contamination, among others, have increased the infertility rate in industrialized countries from 7%-8% in 1960 to 20%-35% today. But there is still hope! Thanks to techniques like ours, the evolution of species is protected.

Eduard Sànchez
Technical Manager
MICROPTIC S.L.