The metazoan parasitic blood f lukes, Schistosoma spp., infect over 200 million people worldwide and cause extensive human morbidity and mortality. Research strategies for development of anti-schistosomal agents are impeded by the organism's complex molluscan-mammalian life cycle, which limits experimental approaches and availability of material. We derived long-term continuously proliferative cultures of Schistosoma mansoni sporocysts capable of generating cercariae in vitro. Cultured organisms retained the ability to parasitize the host, and they exhibited developmental regulation of candidate stage-specific genes in the host-free culture system. Evidence for expression of a reverse transcriptase also was found in the cultured organisms, pointing to this activity as a possible mechanistic contributor to the dynamic relationship between the parasite and its hosts. Continuous in vitro propagation of the asexual sporocyst stage allows isolation of clonally derived parasite populations and provides a means to study schistosomal molecular genetics, metabolism, and evasion of host defenses.Schistosoma mansoni, Schistosoma haematobium, and Schistosoma japonicum create widespread disease in tropical developing countries (1). These parasites thwart attempts to produce practical and effective vaccines, and pharmacological approaches are problematic (2). Schistosome eggs are laid by females paired with males and residing in the vasculature of parasitized vertebrate hosts. To be successfully infective, eggs must penetrate the intestinal wall and pass in feces to fresh water. From these released eggs hatch free-swimming miracidia, the first larval form. Successful miracidia encounter and penetrate the appropriate species of snail and develop into sporocysts, the second larval from. In the following weeks, these primary sporocysts asexually generate first-generation and second-generation daughter sporocysts in the snail. From the later-generation sporocysts develop the third larval form, free-swimming cercaria. To be successfully infective in the human or other vertebrate host, cercaria must encounter and penetrate the skin of the host and undergo further changes to form schistosomula. These move through several further developmental stages, ultimately leading to sexual pairing in the veins of the parasitized host and egg production.Approaches to elucidate the mechanisms schistosomes employ to escape host immunity, as well as molecular genetic and pharmacological investigations, have been limited by the lack of an in vitro system for the continuous proliferative culture of the parasite in the absence of the host. Recently, Yoshino and colleagues (3, 4) have reported significant success in limited culture of the intramolluscan stages of S. mansoni and S.japonicum, but these techniques do not allow extended culture of proliferating sporocysts.Here we describe long-term cultures of S. mansoni in vitro and the development from the snail-infective miracidial stage, through generations of mother and daughter sporocysts, t...