National Institutes of Health Roadmap Grant Awarded to Teresa Woodruff
Saving fertility as well as lives...

Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine has been awarded a $21 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a landmark national research, clinical and education program that targets fertility threats posed to women by cancer treatment.

The program, called The Oncofertility Consortium, is headed by leading fertility researcher Teresa Woodruff, PhD, Thomas J. Watkins Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and chief of the Feinberg School's newly created fertility preservation division. She coined the term oncofertility to define the pioneering new discipline in which cancer treatment and fertility health intersect.

The program is being funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research, an effort to integrate aspects of different disciplines to address health challenges that have been resistant to traditional research approaches. A central goal of Roadmap programs is "to help transform the way research is conducted," said Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the NIH.

When a woman is diagnosed with cancer, saving her life is the focus of her treatment. But the powerful chemotherapy and radiation that cures cancer or sends it into remission can destroy a woman's ability to conceive children. The goal of the new program is to significantly alter how the medical world cares for female cancer patients and promote a new consciousness to protect their reproductive health.

"We're trying to create a total shift in how we interact with female cancer patients to anticipate their lives as survivors and their ability to bear children," said Woodruff, who is the architect of the new consortium and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

The Oncofertility Consortium is comprised of an interdisciplinary team of biomedical and social scientists, oncologists, pediatricians, engineers, educators, social workers and medical ethicists from Northwestern and the University of California-San Diego, University of Pennsylvania, University of Missouri-Columbia and Oregon Health & Science University. Its research will include a thorough examination of the scientific, medical, psychological, legal and ethical issues surrounding infertility and cancer.

Consortium members will work together on scientific, medical, psychological, legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of advanced reproductive technologies in cancer patients. Researchers will investigate how young women will be able to afford these new technologies. The consortium also will assess how extraordinary stress affects women's decisions and will develop new strategies to improve the quality of communications with newly diagnosed cancer patients.

The funding will support new research to preserve fertility for women and teenage girls. Eventually, it also will have a unique focus on young girls and even infants, the two populations for whom there currently are few options. As the survival rate for childhood cancer continues to improve, saving children's fertility is becoming an urgent mission.

Previous Page