One devastating side effect of cancer treatment for women can be a loss of fertility. Gabriel Figueroa, administrator of Manhattan Reproductive Surgery Center, told Becker's ASC Review Podcast that his team is on the verge of launching a program that could give cancer patients more options for family planning.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast episode here.
Question: What are your best opportunities for growth over the next year or two?
Mr. Figueroa: Something we're really excited about, that we've been hoping to launch soon, is an ovarian tissue cryopreservation and transplantation program. [It] would basically allow us to take, for example, prepubescent cancer patients and be able to harvest ovarian tissue or the entire ovary [and] cryopreserve it.
[The patient would] then go through their cancer treatment, which would otherwise typically destroy the ovary,and [once] they've gone into a remission state, we re-transplant that ovary or that tissue back into the patient so that they can have a family.
It's something that has been, up until the last year or so, fairly experimental. We actually had a team from Denmark come in and help train and set up some of our equipment and go through some of those procedures with our doctors.