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WORKING TOGETHER TO PRESERVE FERTILITY BEYOND CANCER THE ONCOFERTILITY CONSORTIUM MEETING MIGRATES TO MWRI by Gina Edwards How do cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation impact a patient’s fertility? This question drove the creation of the Oncofertility Consortium — a multidisciplinary community examining how to integrate fertility preservation conversations with physicians and families amid a devastating disease diagnosis. The Oncofertility Consortium was established in 2007 by Dr. Teresa Woodruff, then a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University. The NIH Roadmap funding for the Consortium included Northwestern University, Oregon Health & Science University, University of California in San Diego, University of Missouri, and University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kyle Orwig, a fertility preservation researcher at MageeWomens Research Institute (MWRI), explains that when the Consortium was created in the early 2000s, a cancer diagnosis was considered dire, and conversations about quality of life after cancer were not common.
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“It’s a new discipline that recognizes the fact that we have to reach across different areas of expertise to provide the best quality of care for our patients. And neither one of those disciplines individually would be able to do that,” Dr. Orwig says. “We had to hold hands and do it together.” For the first decade of the Oncofertility Consortium’s existence, more than 200 attendees from around the world gathered in Chicago for the annual conference, which included physicians, researchers, social scientists, psychologists, and patient navigators. To Dr. Orwig, this meeting unified a group of people that might not have otherwise gathered. “Over the years, the conference has helped foster an international community of people with a common interest in ensuring the highest quality of life for cancer survivors, including the possibility of having children. And so, we start to work together around that issue,” he says. Periodically, Dr. Woodruff would suggest that Dr. Orwig host the next Oncofertility Conference in Pittsburgh. The disruption of COVID-19 in 2020 and the transition of Dr. Woodruff and the Oncofertility Consortium from Northwestern University to Michigan State University, set the stage for a change of venue. Dr. Orwig and his team at MWRI were ready to take on the challenge.
“In those early days, nobody talked about fertility in the context of the cancer diagnosis,” Dr. Orwig says. “That just wasn’t done.” Dr. Woodruff coined the term “oncofertility” in 2006 to indicate that the field is not strictly fertility nor oncology, but in fact an emerging multidisciplinary social science.
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