“Cleveland Clinic is an incredibly special place filled with incredibly special people caring for incredibly sick patients,” says Scott Lundy, MD, PhD, HCLD.
Co-Investigator
Co-Investigator
Co-Investigator
Childhood cancer is as devastating as any diagnosis in medicine. This heartbreak is then compounded by the realization that one’s child may never be able to have children of their own later in life due to damage to the reproductive cells during treatment. However, a VeloSano Pilot Grant awardee is hoping to create a solution for young patients.
Scott Lundy, MD, PhD, HCLD, helps pediatric patients undergoing cancer treatment preserve their future fertility by saving their testicular tissue before treatment starts. The hope is that future scientific progress will develop a way to generate sperm from this immature tissue and allow for in vitro fertilization in the future. The testicle contains millions of Sertoli cells or “nurse cells.” Without these nurse cells, sperm can’t be formed.
Dr. Lundy, along with Kara Bendle, MSN, RN, CPN, CNL, Seth Rotz, MD, and Sarah C. Vij, MD, is studying how Sertoli cells grow and become functional and how chemotherapy disrupts this process. The team will use frozen tissue samples from pediatric cancer survivors to learn how to grow and use Sertoli cells in the lab, a critical first step in future work to grow sperm in the dish. When their study is complete, their intent is to have taken the first critical steps towards building a system to offer biological fatherhood to survivors who wish to grow their families one day.
“We have the opportunity to help them every day with their clinical care, and we have the opportunity to help them on a broader scale with research care and research advancements,” says Dr. Lundy. “This is the best place in the world doing that type of work on a high level.”
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