Chapter 06 : Building a Program in Reproductive Health at MD Anderson

Chapter 06 : Building a Program in Reproductive Health at MD Anderson

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Description

In this chapter, Dr. Schover explains that Dr. Ellen Gritz hired her in the Department of Behavioral Science to bring in grants and create programs in reproductive health. She discusses projects she worked on: intervention studies for men undergoing prostate cancer treatment; effectiveness of online interventions for follow up; studies of women under 35 undergoing treatment who wanted to have children later.

Dr. Schover explains the impact of her research in an evolving field and the fact that her work helped to launch the field of onco-fertility, predating even work done at the Onco-fertility Institute at Northwestern University.

Identifier

SchoverL_01_20180918_C06

Publication Date

9-18-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution; The Researcher; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; Survivors, Survivorship; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Building/Transforming the Institution; Discovery and Success; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; MD Anderson Product Development and IP; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation; Finance, Entrepreneur, Biotechnology

Transcript

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah, it was very difficult. I often think that those first couple of years at MD Anderson probably took ten years off my lifespan, because I was so petrified. I mean, I had never been fired, I had never felt like such a failure, and here I was, coming with one medium sized grant and everyone in behavioral science had three big grants, and I was so afraid that I was going to fall on my face.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So this was 1999, that you returned.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

But it was Ellen Gritz who had made the initial approach to you, and she was the one that welcomed you back.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, we knew each other from UCLA. I’m not sure, I think we knew each other more socially than professionally, but you know, as I got involved in cancer, we kind of kept in touch with each other.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So what was your mandate when you came back? What were you brought back to do?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, to get grants and to develop the whole area of kind of reproductive health and cancer. And so for most of the time that I was at MD Anderson, I actually was very well funded. I had grants from the Lance Armstrong Foundation and from the American Cancer Society and from the National Cancer Institute. I was the first person in the department to get small business grants, which when Ellen first found out about that, she was like, ‘What? That’s not a real grant.’ Now of course, everybody wants them.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Right. So how did you—what were the projects that you worked on?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

One series of projects were about prostate cancer and sexuality, and first I had grants to kind of do big surveys and look at what were the complex sexual problems with different kinds of prostate cancer treatment and what kinds of treatment for erectile dysfunction did men with prostate cancer actually use, and what did they drop out of, which people were not looking at that in much detail at that time. And then I developed a couple of intervention studies of—you know, one of the issues with treating sexual problems in a tertiary cancer center is people aren’t around for very long periods of time and you have to give them a lot of information, and then how do you follow up. How do you follow up and make sure that they’re really following through on the things you’re asking them to do, especially with cognitive behavioral treatment where you’re giving them homework and things like that. So as the Internet around that time, started to be a potential source of health information, I got very interested in the idea of doing interventions that could be online, where you could have patients access them from anywhere and you could follow through by phone or by—there wasn’t really videoconferencing back then but by phone or in person, when they came back for follow-ups or things like that. That was one line of research. I also took that initial study about how important it was for younger people with cancer, to be able to pursue parenthood, and we did a study of women who were diagnosed before age 35, and we compared women who had already had all the children they wanted, with women who had been diagnosed before they’d completed their families, and they were now like ten years out. We found that the women who had not been able to have biological children, who had wanted them retrospectively, were still distressed about it ten years later, that it was really a long-term important issue. I also got—and Marvin Meistrich [oral history interview] may have told you about this, but we got an [NIH] R13 conference grant, so in 2004 and again in 2005, we did major multidisciplinary conferences on cancer and fertility that were very successful and got a very diverse group of researchers together, some who were looking at the very biological nature of damage to eggs and sperm, and some who were looking at psychosocial and ethical issues. Everybody told me oh, this conference will never work because these kind of people don’t want to listen to each other, but actually, I think people really loved that conference. We did a special, a monograph of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2005, which was funded by the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and we published the proceedings of the first of the two conferences, which actually had two embargoed papers, so that was really—you know that were about to come out as journal articles. So, it was a great conference and we did more, a follow-up working group conference the next year.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So the finding really was that these folks from very different disciplines, actually were willing to listen, at the very least. And did that—what kind of impact did those gatherings have? Did it facilitate collaborations?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

I think it did. One of the people that attended the first conference ended up coming back several years [later], from France, and spending six months with me, and we still are good friends and have collaborated on papers and things like that. I think, from Marv’s point of view, it facilitated a number of more molecular biological collaborations, and I think what it did was it really helped launch the whole field of oncofertility. People talk about the Oncofertility Institute at Northwestern, but we predated that by four or five years I think, and I don’t know if the big grant that they got to start that program would have been as easy to put together or come about, if we hadn’t kind of led the way with that conference. So I think it was a contribution to the field.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Interesting. I’m wondering, you know what—it sounds like there was this critical mass too, of individuals who were working in the field. What was going on that…?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

It was also very international. We had a lot of people from Europe at that conference. I don’t know if we had anyone from Asia.

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Chapter 06 : Building a Program in Reproductive Health at MD Anderson

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