Fertility, Cancer, and Ovarian Tissue Cryopreservation

Cancer and going through cancer treatments like chemotherapy can affect fertility and can make having a child more difficult. It's important to speak with your cancer care team about your family planning goals before starting treatment or having surgery to ensure you have the most options available. If you haven’t discussed fertility before starting treatment, it is important to bring up as soon as possible. Your doctor or nurse won’t always remember to bring this up, so if fertility is important to you now or could be in the future, you may need to bring it up yourself. With the likelihood of surviving cancer on the rise, it's important to think about quality of life after cancer and if having a biological child (or another child) could be important to you. The good news is that there are options for both females and males to preserve their fertility and have the opportunity to have a baby later on, once treatment is complete. Should you choose to preserve your fertility, a Reproductive Endocrinologist (fertility doctor) will be able to help you with this process.

Egg freezing
Egg freezing is a way for females to preserve eggs for use in the future. When faced with a cancer diagnosis, you will typically only have time to be able to do one cycle before wanting to start treatment. This could be a good option for females who might not yet have a partner, aren’t interested in using donor sperm to create embryos or have a religious conflict with freezing embryos. During the retrieval process, the mature eggs will be extracted, frozen and safely stored until you are ready. This process will take about two weeks and require injectable medications before the procedure. Once you are ready to try to become pregnant, the eggs can then be thawed, fertilized by a partner's or donor's sperm, and transferred to the uterus to try to achieve pregnancy. In other words, if you have trouble getting pregnant on your own later on, you will be able to use your eggs to create embryos and you will be able to undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF) to help you try to become pregnant.

Embryo freezing
Embryo freezing is similar to egg freezing in that the process to retrieve the eggs will be the same with the exception being that the eggs will be fertilized using a partner or donor sperm to create embryos before being frozen and stored. Similarly, if you have trouble getting pregnant on your own later on, you will be able to use the embryos to undergo IVF to try to achieve pregnancy.

Sperm freezing
Sperm freezing is an established and effective method to preserve fertility for males. We recommend freezing at least two samples. Once a sample has been collected, it will be analyzed in our lab for the number of sperm cells (sperm count), percentage of sperm able to swim (motility) and percentage of sperm that are normally shaped (morphology). The sperm cells are then safely frozen and stored for future use. Sperm can remain frozen for decades and even if you’re not sure if you might want to father a baby later on, sperm freezing is fairly easy and will allow you to keep your options open.

Ovarian Tissue Cryopreservation
Ovarian tissue freezing or Ovarian Tissue Cryopreservation (OTC) was first developed over two decades ago. This new technology allows your doctor to freeze ovarian tissue containing thousands of immature eggs before you begin cancer treatment. This way, when treatment is complete and you’re ready, your ovarian tissue can be transplanted back into your body allowing you to regain full ovarian function, including fertility. Compared to egg freezing, which typically takes at least two weeks and yields an average of 8-14 eggs, we can now freeze thousands of eggs in a single sample of ovarian tissue. This medical breakthrough greatly increases your chances of achieving pregnancy when you are ready and even gives women the opportunity to conceive spontaneously without IVF.

Can a woman get pregnant after chemo or cancer treatment?
Women who need to start cancer treatment urgently and don’t have the time it takes to go through an egg freezing cycle should consider OTC. Egg freezing requires at least 2 weeks while OTC can be done within days. Undergoing the OTC procedure guarantees more chances of conceiving later on while allowing you to receive necessary treatments without delay.

Childhood Cancer and Fertility
For girls who have not yet reached puberty, ovarian tissue freezing is currently the only option to preserve fertility. With the likelihood of surviving pediatric cancer on the rise, now around 80%, it is important to think about quality of life after treatment and if having biological children could be important later on. With chemotherapy and radiation causing girls to be at a high risk of POI (premature ovarian insufficiency) OTC will be their only opportunity to have a biological child later in life. Parents should take this into consideration and talk to their child to help them make this important decision.


No matter which method you choose for preserving your fertility, you should discuss your future goals, like how many children you would like to have, and make a plan based on the risks associated with any medical treatments you will undergo. To learn more about Ovarian Cryopreservation, keep reading:

When it comes to reproductive cryopreservation, it has traditionally been all about eggs and sperm. You can freeze your eggs and sperm through a rapid freezing technique called vitrification. Vitrification is an effective technology that rapidly cools eggs, or sperm without the damaging effects of any ice crystals forming. Your cells are fully immersed in liquid nitrogen, maintaining their cellular integrity for the duration of the time frozen. This method of freezing is highly effective for embryo and egg freezing but is not the preferred method for ovarian tissue freezing. The preferred method for ovarian tissue freezing is a computer controlled slow freezing method which has proven to be the most successful method for ovarian tissue freezing. Attempts to freeze ovarian tissue by the rapid vitrification technique so far have failed to deliver results comparable to the slow computer controlled tissue freezing technique.

If you have been diagnosed with any type of cancer, you should ask your doctor what your next steps will be. If they suggest chemotherapy or radiation treatment, you should ask them how the side effects could affect your fertility. It is important to undergo any fertility preservation treatment before you begin chemotherapy or radiation. You will have to make the decision quickly once diagnosed. It is best to ask as many questions as you might have in the beginning so that you can get the best possible outcome to align with your future family planning goals. If you decide you would like to have the option of having biological children in the future, you should schedule a consultation with a fertility specialist as soon as possible so as not to delay your cancer treatment plan.

Although there are certain cancers that affect the ovary or blood in which this procedure is not recommended, OTC is effective for most types of cancers. In those special cases that OTC is not recommended prior to cancer treatment, we can perform the procedure after a round of chemotherapy, given that the treatment suppresses the cancer cells and those cells will not survive the freezing process. In any case, your Oncology team, along with your Kofinas Fertility team will discuss the most viable options with you according to your individual needs.