Network

Due to the increas­ing chances of curing cancer, the import­ance of quality of life after surviving cytotoxic and/or radio­ther­apy is increas­ingly coming into focus. In this context, fears about the pre­ser­va­tion of fertility in young men and women are in the focus.

Due to advances in repro­duct­ive medicine, a variety of fertility-pro­tect­ive methods are now available. However, these tech­niques were initially only offered worldwide in indi­vidu­al centres with great expertise, so that many patients were deprived of them.

As a result, the FertiPROTEKT network was founded in May 2006. It now comprises over 150 uni­ver­sity and non-uni­ver­sity centres and has been extended to Austria and parts of Switzerland.

Since our knowledge about the damage to the ovaries and testicles caused by the various chemo­ther­apies is still very limited and the new fertility-pro­tect­ive therapies still need to be further optimised, espe­cially in women, intensive clinical and sci­entif­ic invest­ig­a­tions are necessary. These can only be optimally dealt with in a network such as FertiPROTEKT, so we have set ourselves many other important goals in addition to patient care, which is the focus of our efforts.

Our main object­ives are:

• Every patient of repro­duct­ive age should be able to receive fertility coun­selling before and after gon­ado­tox­ic therapy.
• All effective fertility-pro­tect­ive therapies should be offered nationwide.
• Therapies are further developed, optimised and sensibly applied in close cooper­a­tion with onco­lo­gists from all disciplines.
• The imple­ment­a­tion of the therapies is reviewed and optimised with regard to their effect­ive­ness and costs.
• The toxicity of the currently used chemo­ther­apies will be evaluated with the help of blood tests before and after chemo­ther­apy in order to use less gon­ado­tox­ic chemo­ther­apy regimens in the future, if necessary.
• The psy­cho­lo­gic­al relief provided by coun­selling and the imple­ment­a­tion of fertility-pro­tect­ive therapies is evaluated.

Since some of the fertility-pro­tect­ive therapies have not yet been stand­ard­ised, but their effect­ive­ness depends crucially on an optimal technique, all of the FertiPROTEKT centres mentioned have committed them­selves to following the strict standards and quality controls and to par­ti­cip­at­ing in the sci­entif­ic evaluation.