Oncofertility Summer Research Experience 2009

With support from the federal stimulus package Northwestern received from the National Cancer Institute, two teachers and two undergraduates gained hands-on experience in a working lab devoted to providing new fertility options for cancer patients!

The money allowed Northwestern to bring relevant lab activities to teachers around the country and bring girls through the pipeline toward careers in science.

This video gives you an idea of what the experience was like. Check out the job summary to see if you or someone you know would be interested in doing it next summer:

http://www.osep.northwestern.edu/osep/summerfellowship/
http://www.research.northwestern.edu/

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

An article on infertility and religion in the context of Oncofertility came out today on the Medill Reports Web site. In “Reconciling religion and infertility,” Alina Dain uses the discussions from the Second Annual Oncofertility Summit to explain the different points of view various religions have on what is morally acceptable when trying to conceive after cancer.

The article covers Judaism, Islam and Catholism and includes quotes from Dr. Sherman Silber, Laurie Zoloth, Rumee Ahmed and Paul Lauritzen, all speakers at this year’s Summit.

A magazine in Brazil, “Isto É,” highlighted the Oncofertility Consortium’s research in an article entitled “Depois do câncer, a chance de ter filhos: Tratamentos de reproduçaõ assistida permitem aos pacientes realizar o sonho da gravidez” (A chance at having children after cancer: Assisted reproductive technologies allow patients to carry out their dreams of pregnancy) by Renata Cabral.

You can find the article in the “Medicine and Well-Being” section on page 17 of the July 15th issue of the weekly.

Click here for the online version of the article.

In case you missed the Virtual Grand Rounds from July 16th, you can watch the video of “The National Physicians Cooperative: Tales from the Front; Establishing a Comprehensive Fertility Preservation Program”on the Oncofertility Web site here.

The OSA counterpart in San Diego, the Be WiSE (Better Education for Women in Science and Engineering) Young Women in Cancer Research Oncofertility Academy, was highlighted in the Del Mar Times. Twelve young women representing 10 high schools were at the event on July 25 to learn about Oncofertility and to hear from an ovarian cancer survivor.

Read more about it in the article by Gina McGalliard 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.

Jim Kirkwood from K-Talk on KTKK-AM, a radio station in Salt Lake City, mentioned Teresa Woodruff and our Oncofertility research during his 10pm show on July 14th.

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.