Recently, WBEZ Chicago’s Eight Forty-Eight came to the Oncofertility Consortium to interview Dr. Woodruff about fertility preservation for cancer patients.  While the interview mainly discussed new techniques that will provide hope for cancer patients facing potential infertility, the interview also discussed the Illinois Women’s Health Registry and the Oncofertility Saturday Academy.

From the WBEZ website:

Last year, Dr. Teresa Woodruff won a $21 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create the Oncofertility Consortium. There she hopes to develop new fertility treatments for people who have undergone treatment for cancer. While many people can survive a cancer diagnosis, the treatments can destroy fertility. Dr. Woodruff runs The Woodruff Lab at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and also runs the Oncofertility Saturday Academy. It brings young women from a small high school on Chicago’s South Side into the lab to learn basic biology and clinical medicine.

The audio of the interview is included!

Eight Forty-Eight Interview

Hello all. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself.
I am a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the George Washington University School of Law. Previously, I was affiliated with Northwestern University Law School, which is how I got involved in the Oncofertility project. I am a trained attorney, but also a doctor. Because of my background, the Oncofertility project was of particular interest to me.
My role on the project is to help explore legal issues that are likely to face the scientists, doctors, patients, and families that come in contact with Oncofertility. In collaboration with several other authors, we recently published an article titled “Medical Hope, Legal Pitfalls” which explores these issues. We are currently in the process of revising that article into a book chapter. I hope to post on the blog whenever a legal story or case of interest and relevance to Oncofertility is in the news. I look forward to the conversation.

I am a graduate student in Dr. Lonnie Shea’s group investigating biomaterials for regenerative medicine. I have just completed my first year of graduate school in the department of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University. I did my undergraduate studies at Iowa State University, majoring in Biochemistry. I would like to further the understanding of how a follicle interacts with its environment by creating synthetic matrices with biomaterials. I will be considering both mechanical and biological signaling between the follicle and its environment. The influence of mechanical signaling (called mechanotransduction) is a relatively new area of study, so a lot of exciting new discoveries in the field of mechanotransduction are happening! My “big-picture” goal is to apply these findings to the creation of in vitro models of fertility and infertility, and to improve the follicle culture system for the clinical applications of the Oncofertility project.

Hello – my name is Mandy Redig and I’m an MD/PhD student in my final year of medical school at Northwestern.  I moved to Chicago in the summer of 2003, and several years later I have now completed my PhD in cancer biology and am looking forward to residency interviews this fall.  I plan to pursue a career in oncology, and I hope to move forward in a way that allows me to integrate both my interests in clinical medicine and my fascination with the discovery process of basic science.  During the course of my training I have also become very interested in questions of cancer survivorship, and that combined with my experience rotating in Dr. Woodruff’s lab back in the summer of 2003 is what has led me to become involved with some writing projects related to Oncofertility.

Teresa Woodruff, director of the Oncofertility Consortium, was interviewed on WGN-TV, Chicago about follicle maturation for cancer and fertility research.

In the video interview from August 5th, Teresa talks about isolating individual follicle cells and storing them in a 3D gel similar to the ovary’s environment where the follicles may be able to mature. Then the eggs from the follicles would be available to implant for fertilization. But the process is still experimental, for now.

CLTV picked up the video yesterday. You can watch it here.

The annual Oncofertility Consortium Conference is September 13-15, 2009 in Chicago at Prentice Women’s Hospital. The Oncofertility Consortium is seeking abstract submissions for the poster session (video and traditional posters) for work related to the field of fertility preservation. The deadline is August 15, 2009. Please visit http://oncofertility.northwestern.edu to register for the conference, view the agenda, and SUBMIT ABSTRACTS!!!

Hi! I’m Jacqueline de la Cruz (you can also call me Jackie) and I just joined the Oncofertility Consortium in June as a Clinical Research Coordinator. I recently completed my MPH in Maternal and Child Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, after having received my BA in Human Biology at Stanford University. Chicago is my home, so it was great to come back to study and work here!

My work with the Consortium will mainly consist of supporting the research initiatives of the National Physicians’ Cooperative (NPC), a group of 60 nationwide institutions that work together to investigate and provide fertility preservation options for cancer patients. I’m excited about working so closely with these innovative groups and will definitely keep everyone updated with the NPC’s progress!