Future fertility for the very young cancer victims

In early 2007, scientists from Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem announced that they had successfully extracted eggs from cancer patients aged between 5 and 10, artificially matured and cryo-preserved them. Of-course it will be a few years before it is known whether the ultimate goal, that of enabling these young cancer survivors to become mothers, is realized. However, even this hope would have been a pipe-dream a couple of years previously.

Preserving Ovarian Tissue

In September 2004, a Belgian woman Ouarda Touirat became the first ever woman to give birth after frozen ovarian tissue had been implanted back into her body.

In fact, freezing of ovarian tissue prior to cancer treatment has been practiced for over a decade now but this was the first such birth.

In 2005, Stephanie Yarber in St. Louis in the United States gave birth to a daughter after she had received ovarian tissue transplant from her twin sister. In her case, she had gone through very early menopause when she developed premature ovarian failure at age 14.

Freezing the whole ovary

Probably the holy grail of fertility preservation for a woman will be the ability to cryo-preserve the whole ovary and implant it back into the body years later. Some have gone further to suggest that this could be the perfect answer for the ambitious woman who wants to pursue her career and start a family later, in her 40 or even 50s. Others have even suggested that the technique could effectively be used to postpone the menopause since the ovary will have been frozen in time and will remain at the age , let’s say the mid-20s, when it was extracted. However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At the time of writing this, there is a lot of research in this area in many centres across the world. However, success does not appear to be on the horizon just yet.

Next Section: Umbilical Cord blood banking

Quarda Touirat: Post-cancer pregnancy after ovarian tissue implantation

Francois Lenoir / Reuters

Stephanie Yarber: Ovarian tissue transplant

Stephanie Yarber (left) conceived five months after getting an ovarian tissue transplant donated by her twin sister Melanie (right) and had a healthy baby girl in 2005. She did not have a history of cancer but had gone into premature ovarian failure 11 years earlier aged 14.

Baby Tamara Bouanati was born to Quarda Touirat in Brussels in October 2004 after a successful ovarian tissue re-implantation. Quarda had been treated for advanced Hodgkin’s lymphoma seven years previously at age 25.