Aiming to preserve fertility for women undergoing cancer treatments, oncofertility researchers are developing biomaterials that mimic the structure and function of the ovary.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s amazing! What do we do for our young women?’ And the physician who told me about this said, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t worry about that; they need to really focus on their cancer.’” – Teresa Woodruff, Michigan State University
“You can recapitulate and reintroduce this continuous crosstalk between the follicle and other cells that are found in the ovary normally.” – Ariella Shikanov, University of Michigan
“If we are going to reconstruct the whole ovary with these different regions, 3D printing would enable us to engineer the different environments that the quiescent follicle pool needs, but also that the growing follicles need.” – Monica Laronda, Northwestern University/Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
“In most tissues, we’re able to say, here are all the cell type components of a tissue. And in the ovary, we’ve been really behind the eight ball.” – Francesca Duncan, Northwestern University
Read full interview article at DRUGDISCOVERYNEWS.COM APRIL 2023