A seven-year old girl diagnosed with cancer who receives chemotherapy or radiation may very well survive the cancer. But up until a few years ago, the procedures that saved her would have prevented her from being able to get pregnant later on in life. Dr. Jennia Michaeli, a Clinician Investigator and Staff Physician at Mount Sinai Fertility, says she thinks night and day about this and all the other young girls in similar situations.
“In many other countries, these girls have their fertility preserved as part of standard oncology care. If they survive the cancer, when they reach adulthood, they stand a good chance of being able to have children. Not all of them, but most. In Canada, until we introduced ovarian tissue cryopreservation just a few years ago, this was not possible.”
Dr. Michaeli is referring to an approach for which she is expanding awareness and, together with her colleagues, is putting into practice across the country. Ovarian tissue cryopreservation involves removing some or all of one of the patient’s ovaries and freezing it. It can be transplanted back into the patient years later, making natural or assisted pregnancy possible.
Ovarian tissue preservation has been used in other countries for some 20 years, and if Dr. Michaeli and a few other like-minded colleagues have their way, it will soon be common practice in Canada as well.
This preservation of fertility has been a professional focus for Dr. Michaeli since she was a medical student in Israel and the ovarian tissue cryopreservation process was in its infancy. She maintained this focus as a clinical fellow in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at Mount Sinai Hospital, and she is pursuing it full throttle today as a Clinician Investigator and Staff Physician at Mount Sinai Fertility.
Dr. Ellen Greenblatt, mentor and former Medical Director of Mount Sinai Fertility, says “full throttle” is a very good way to describe her colleague. “Jennia is a human Energizer Bunny,” she says.
“She knows the world landscape for ovarian tissue freezing. She cares deeply about what she is doing and the families she meets,” shares Dr. Greenblatt. “And she does it very well. There are young women in Canada who are going to have babies one day, and it’ll be because of Dr. Michaeli.”
Dr. Michaeli and Dr. Greenblatt recently won an award for excellence in research from the Oncofertility Consortium in Pittsburgh for their innovations in ovarian tissue cryopreservation. Dr. Michaeli also recently presented her work at the International Society for Fertility Preservation (ISFP2024) conference in Tokyo, where she spoke about her latest work exploring the evidence around prolonged cryopreservation of oocytes.
If you ask Dr. Michaeli how she thinks of herself — is she a researcher at heart, or a clinician? — she will say a clinician, as everything she does is with her patients in mind. She loves to actively improve the care that her patients are receiving. To that end, she is particularly proud of the work she is doing partnering with other hospitals to develop formal referral pathways and fertility preservation programs, so that when oncologists identify a fertility risk in their patients, a streamlined path exists for them to refer those patients for fertility preservation procedures.
“I really feel as if we are making a long overdue breakthrough, bringing an innovative strategy for fertility preservation to Canada. And I couldn’t be doing this anywhere but Sinai Health, where there is such fertile ground for this work,” she says, laughing at the pun. “We are supported in doing both clinical and basic science research work in this area, and I am so grateful to be where I am, doing what I do, to help young women preserve their chance of starting a family, a milestone that many survivors see as a profound triumph over cancer.”