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

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.

WIRED magazine ran a story last week based on the research article published in the journal Human Reproduction received many comments.

“A Fertility First: Human Egg Cells Grow Up in Lab” written by Hadley Leggett has already gotten 18 comments on the WIRED Web site. People were interested to learn about the study from “In vitro grown human ovarian follicles from cancer patients support oocyte growth” by Min Xu, Susan Barrett, Erin West-Farrell, Laxmi Kondapalli, Sarah Kiesewetter, Lonnie Shea and Teresa Woodruff.

Someone was curious about how the alginate used in the study doesn’t actually make contact with the follicles but still supports them and other people asked interesting questions about religion, adoption and ethics. 

By the way, many of these topics will be discussed at the Oncofertility Summit this week.

The recent study that came out in the journal Human Reproduction (see previous posts on NIH news release and Northwestern NewsCenter article) has gained media attention in India. The Web site MedIndia.net featured an article on it today. To read it, click here.

Read more about the study in Human Reproduction that was mentioned in the NIH news release today on the Northwestern University NewsCenter Web site here.

Today the National Institutes of Health published a news released based on an article about Oncofertility research from the journal Human Reproduction “In vitro grown human ovarian follicles from cancer patients support oocyte growth” by Min Xu, Susan Barrett, Erin West-Farrell, Laxmi Kondapalli, Sarah Kiesewetter, Lonnie Shea and Teresa Woodruff.

The researchers were trying to develop a way for the in vitro (in a controlled environment outside of the body) growth of undeveloped follicles (a fluid-filled sac containing an immature egg) as a way to restore fertility in women who have undergone radiation or chemotherapy to fight cancer. For the investigation, the researchers took out secondary follicles from human ovarian tissue donated by 14 different cancer patients ranging from 16 to 39 years old. The follicles were then grown in a specially-designed bio-engineered culture for 30 days.

The researchers found that the follicles developed from the secondary stage to the antral stage (the final stage of growth of an oocyte which then develops into an egg). Therefore, the results of the study indicated that it was possible for follicles to continue development even when not in the human body. This is encouraging but more research needs to be done to see whether these oocytes can eventually be fertilized.

(To see an animation of normal female fertility, click here.)

To read the study online on the Human Reproduction Web site, click here.

To read the NIH news release, click here.

Look out for more news coverage of the Oncofertility Consortium’s study!

Lonnie Shea here. I am the bioengineer that runs the biomaterials core and have been collaborating with Teresa Woodruff for the past 8 years on the development of the culture system for ovarian follicles. This culture system is the technology that can enable frozen tissue to produce mature eggs for use with in vitro fertilization.

This culture system is being highlighted by the bioengineering institute at NIH – NIBIB is the acronym – in an upcoming newsletter to the bioengineering community. This culture system is a success stories in the broad field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine – and, I expect, will raise awareness among another group of researchers.

My name is Ariella Shikanov and I am a biomaterials scientist in the Shea-Woodruff collaboratory for the Oncofertility Consortium. I received my PhD in Medicinal Chemistry, developing a biodegradable polymeric carrier (a synthetic material that is broken down when put in the body and a drug is released as a result) for anti-cancer drugs for local treatment of solid tumors.

The main idea of my graduate research was to generate a high local concentration of the chemotherapeutic agent at the tumor site, while avoiding high systemic concentrations that cause toxicity. Currently I am working in a completely different area, which makes it interesting and challenging at the same time.

My knowledge in biomaterials allows me to develop new three-dimensional systems (using new materials that mimic the 3-D environment in the body versus a flat surface) for ovarian follicle culture and ovarian transplantation to preserve fertility. A matrix (a material, environment or gel) for follicle culture must have mild gelation, support and allow follicle growth. I will be blogging about potential biomaterials that can be used for fertility preservation research.

Read the new article here.

Marina Peluffo and Teresa Woodruff stand in front of the abstract poster Peluffo won an award for at the 15th World Congress on IVF in Geneva, Switzerland in April 2009.

Marina Peluffo, an Oncofertility Consortium member from Portland, Oregon, won an award for her poster abstract “Cumulus Oocyte Complexes from Small Antral Follicles during the Early Follicular Phase of Spontaneous Cycles in Rhesus Monkeys Can Expand and Yield Oocytes Capable of Maturation In Vitro”.

Her poster was presented at the 15th World Congress on IVF in Geneva, Switzerland earlier this year. Teresa Woodruff also attended the Congress in April and was one of the 100 plenary speakers to address close to 750 participants from 67 different countries. For more information about the Congress go to the ISIVF Web site.

To view our previous entry on the World Congress, click here: Oncofertility at the 15th World Congress on IVF.