Artificial ovary a step closer in major boost that could save thousands

An artificial ovary that could help countless cancer survivors have children is a step closer, as researchers reveal how you can help.

Stacey-Lee Craanen, 29, says anything that can help cancer survivors like her have children would be a “massive breakthrough”. Picture: Wayne Taylor

An artificial ovary is a step closer, offering hope to thousands of cancer survivors unable to have children because of treatment side effects.

The project – driven by the Melbourne researcher who opened the world’s first egg bank so women with cancer could undergo IVF – hopes to save leukaemia patients’ fertility without saving their cancer.

Royal Women’s Hospital Head of Cryopreservation Services Dr Debra Gook said she was “fairly optimistic” their Cancer Council-funded research will succeed after almost ten years of work, following “promising” mouse trials.

“We’re about 50 per cent of the way there,” she said.

Some cancer patients can have babies using ovarian tissue frozen before treatment harmed their follicles, tiny sacs in their ovaries that grow and nurture eggs.

But Dr Gook said this was not safe for leukaemia patients, because the bloodborne disease was “likely to also be in the ovary”.

“If we took the tissue and froze it and then transplanted it back, we then have a high risk that we would reinitiate the cancer after they’ve had a cure,” she said.

But Dr Gook hoped their jelly-like artificial ovary – which she likened to the scaffolding around a building under constructions – could change this.

Dr Debra Gook has pioneered fertility research and opened the world’s first egg bank at the Royal Women’s Hospital in 1994.

She said when a woman decided to have children, they would isolate follicles from her frozen tissue and place them in the scaffold, made up of proteins found in the body.

“That holds them together in a similar sort of way that they’re held in the normal ovary, so that makes it sort of the artificial ovary.”

She said they then used new, novel chemotherapies that can “stop the leukaemic cells from proliferating and growing, but the follicles stay alive and continue to grow”.

“We’d then take this sort of jelly containing the follicles and probably inject that back into the ovary,” she said.

Human follicles are harder to isolate and grow than in mouse trials, with a recent experiment with human cells not working as well as hoped, but Dr Gook said they have narrowed down the problem.

“Results are promising,” she said.

“I hope it’s in the near future and that to me would be less than five years away.”

She has also been investigating whether frozen testicular tissue can restore fertility in boys who undergo cancer treatment before they hit puberty, similar to her breakthrough with frozen ovarian tissue option for female patients with other cancers.

Dr Gook said her work would be impossible without Cancer Council Victoria, urging people to give generously on Tuesday, cancer research giving day, when every donation is doubled by a benefactor.

“Without money, research doesn’t happen,” she said.

Stacey-Lee Craanen, 29, at home with her dog Coco, encouraged people to donate. Picture: Wayne Taylor

Melbourne nurse Stacey-Lee Craanen 29, fought acute lymphoblastic leukaemia twice as a child – first diagnosed at just three-years-old – and cannot have children as a result of the intensive treatment.

She said many don’t realise that patients in remission can live with long-term health impacts and feel unable “to live a normal life” and urged people to donate.

“Radiation is like a nuclear bomb going off in your body,” she said.

“Wanting to have children, that’s something I’ll never be able to do.

“If this research works for just one woman who has had leukaemia, it’ll absolutely be worth it.

“That would be a massive breakthrough.”

Cancerresearchgivingday.com.au