The most devastating side-effect to many having undergone radiotherapy or chemotherapy is that the aggressive treatment methods needed to cure their cancer could also render them unable to have children in the future.
When nine-year-old Nathan Crawford from Cornwall was diagnosed with a brain tumor early last year, his parents were told the doctors were unable to surgically remove the growth in his brain without causing serious damage to important brain functions.
The only treatments available was to try and shrink the tumor using radiotherapy and chemotherapy, treatments the family was informed could make Nathan infertile.
But when the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford offered to let the youngster take part in a pioneering medical trial to have his testicular tissue frozen – with the aim to one day re-implant it in the hope that he can go on to have children, parents Donna and Jonathan accepted.
Before Nathan began his radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment, surgeons at the Oxford-based hospital removed a wedge of his testicular tissue and froze it. If, in the future, the re-implantation is successful, Nathan will have a good chance of becoming a father to his own biological children. Nathan is the first UK citizen to have undergone this treatment.
Nathan's mother, Donna, explained to the Huffington Post: "Our decision-making process regarding whether Nathan should have chemotherapy was made so much easier thanks to the fact Oxford could offer this storage of Nathan's cells."
During minimally invasive keyhole surgery surgeons removed a wedge of testicular tissue from one of Nathan's testes. According to the surgeons, the sample contains sperm stem cells, which remain viable when slow-frozen within the small amount of testicular tissue.
This new technique of freezing testicular tissue have shown to work in animal models, and works similarly to ovarian tissue freezing, which has already produced live births for women undergoing the procedure.
Wow, science is pretty flipping amazing, no?
