What is "sperm washing"?

What is "sperm washing"?

Philip Werthman, FACS (Director, Center for Male Reproductive Medicine) gives expert video advice on: What therapies are available to improve male fertility?; What surgeries are performed to treat male infertility? and more...

Sperm washing is a technique that we use in the laboratory, where a man provides a semen sample and we go ahead and let that liquefy because semen comes out as a gel like substance and over a half an hour to 45 minutes, enzymes that are derived from the prostate, actually cause that gel to liquefy. We let the sperm swim out and we're able to separate the moving sperm from the non moving sperm. We then put it in a centrifuge. To do that we decant off the dead sperm, we take the live moving sperm and we suspend it in a very small amount, a half a cc or a half a milliliter of culture media that supports the sperm with nutritional fluids. That half a cc is then loaded up into a little catheter and is placed inside a womans uterus.