Your support is helping researchers make real progress in preserving fertility during cancer treatment – so that surviving cancer doesn’t mean sacrificing the chance to have a family or live a full and healthy life.
Survivors of cancer deserve to have healthy futures, and with more people surviving than ever before, addressing the long-term side effects of cancer treatment is vital to ensuring a good quality of life.
Fertility is especially vulnerable to many cancer treatments. While they’re successful in saving more lives, these treatments can cause permanent damage to ovaries – destroying eggs and potentially causing infertility and early menopause in up to 80 per cent of young patients.
The effects of early menopause can have serious, lifelong health consequences, including increased risk of mental health issues, heart disease and osteoporosis. That’s why Professor Karla Hutt has dedicated her career to finding successful ways to preserve fertility and protect the quality of life for women who have undergone cancer treatment.
She’s now turned her attention to a new class of immunotherapy drugs – known as ‘immune checkpoint inhibitors’ (ICIs) – used to treat a range of cancer types, including cancers common in young females.
These treatments are effective in helping the immune system fight cancer, but recent discoveries show they might also be causing harm to ovaries.
For Karla, finding safer, gentler methods to protect ovaries while saving lives is deeply personal.
“My best friend’s daughter had cancer as a child,” she shared. “The treatment she received was lifesaving, but also likely damaged her ovaries. At the time of her treatment, and still today, there are very limited options for protecting young females undergoing cancer treatment from life-long consequences on their fertility and health.”
In just the first year of her study, Karla and her team have already found clues to how this damage happens.
“Our early results are exciting because they show us where the damage may be coming from,” said Karla.
“If we can pinpoint these mechanisms, we can begin developing strategies to protect the ovaries while still allowing these powerful drugs to fight cancer.”
Karla’s findings already suggest there is a delicate balance to find while treating cancer to protect the long-term quality of life for patients.
With your support, Karla and her team will continue this research in the following years, but the initial findings are important because they may lead to new ways to reduce side effects from cancer treatments – not just in the ovaries, but possibly other organs too.
Support for the next generation
Karla isn’t doing this alone. She’s mentoring rising stars like Dr Lauren Alesi, who’s leading a three-year project to protect eggs during chemotherapy.
Funded by people like you, Lauren is testing a promising new drug that can block a specific protein, known as PUMA, which is shown to trigger egg death during cancer treatment.
Laura is investigating if blocking PUMA is safe, does not compromise chemotherapy efficiency, and can protect eggs – preserving fertility, hormone function and the health of future children.
“As a young woman who wishes to have children in the future, I sympathise greatly with the millions of young girls and women each year who face an infertility diagnosis after surviving cancer. I envision a future where all female cancer survivors can both survive and thrive long after battling the disease,” said Lauren.
If successful, this research will offer hope to females facing cancer – offering a way to prevent ovarian damage before it happens and giving young cancer survivors the chance to truly thrive long after treatment.