What is a long-term goal of Oncofertility research?

One of the keys for us is to continue to ensure and to work towards the day when the chemo that are delivered to cancer patients are smarter. What I mean by that is that it targets the cancer, but doesn’t impact fertility. What we would love to work towards is the elimination of a fertility threat based on the cancer treatment. Now radiation as a treatment, and particularly to the pelvis, is always going to be a fertility threat. But many of the newer chemotherapeutics that are being developed have not had an attention focused on them regarding their fertility threat.

What the Oncofertility Consortium is doing is trying to encourage the basic research on the next generation of chemotherapeutics and on the pharmaceuticals that are bringing those to the patients to think very carefully about how those drugs might impact a young person’s fertility. I think that’s going to be one of the major impacts of the Oncofertility Consortium, both to provide options right now as well as to think in the future about how we might eliminate the threat of chemotherapeutics on fertility.