Program to Preserve Fertility of Cancer Patients
UCSD, along with four leading academic medical centers, will
participate in a $21-million program funded by the National Institutes of
Health to help protect fertility in women being treated for cancer.
The national research, clinical and education program,
called the Oncofertility Consortium, will launch nine projects over a five-year
period.
“This grant will allow us to explore new methods to preserve
a woman’s ability to conceive, before she undergoes chemotherapy and
radiation,” Jeffrey Chang, professor and chief of the division of reproductive
endocrinology and department of reproductive medicine, said in a press release.
Cancer treatments such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy can
damage the ovaries and result in infertility.
The
will lead a National Physicians Cooperative to unify participating universities
and more than 20 medical centers in collecting and preserving ovarian tissue
and eggs.
Cancer patients participating in the 2008 clinical trial
will have an ovary surgically removed before they begin cancer treatment.
Twenty percent of the ovarian tissue will be used for research and 80 percent
will be preserved for the female patient to use in the future.
Sugar Molecules Targeted to Help Detect Cancer
Funded by a $2.3-million grant from the National Cancer
Institute, a new research project at the UCSD School of Medicine will focus on
the early diagnosis and prognosis of lung, pancreatic and ovarian cancers using
molecular glycans as biomarkers.
Ajit Varki, distinguished professor of cellular and
molecular medicine, and Richard Schwab, assistant professor at UCSD’s Rebecca
and
project. The NCI grant is part of a nationwide initiative to develop new
methods of detecting and treating cancer through glycobiology — the study of
the structure, biosynthesis and biology of complex sugar chains.
“Despite many years of work by many investigators, there are
no blood or urine markers that can reliably detect such cancers early enough in
their course to make a difference in survival,” Varki said in a press
release. “Our studies have unveiled a
promising new approach to this problem.”
Numerous studies comparing normal and tumor cells have shown
that their glycan structures change with cancer development.
