Meet the 2021 Young SIOP awardees - Madeleine van der Perk

Hi there! For the coming weeks, our blog will be dedicated to our Young SIOP Award winners!

Please meet Madeleine van der Perk, YI from the Netherlands, in her own words.

My name is Madeleine van der Perk, and I’m working as a clinician PhD-student at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in Utrecht, the Netherlands. 

My PhD project, supervised by Dr. AME Bos, Dr. ALF van der Kooi and Prof. dr. MM van den Heuvel-Eibrink, focusses on (determinants of) gonadal damage due to childhood cancer treatment in girls.

While international guidelines advise to inform all pediatric cancer patients on their risk of gonadal damage, not everyone is informed. Therefore, we developed an oncofertility care plan in the Princess Máxima Center to ensure all patients receive proper oncofertility care. We retrospectively evaluated this oncofertility care plan in our national cohort (PLOS ONE 2021). Currently, the prospective PAREL study “Preserving ovARian function through cryoprEservation and informing girLs with cancer about infertility due to gonadotoxic treatment”(NL72115.041.19) is evaluating oncofertility care for girls in the Princess Máxima Center. 

PAREL aims to study whether all girls are identified, triaged, informed and girls at risk of gonadal damage subsequently counseled on fertility preservation options, including ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC), by a gynecologist. Surgical and hormonal safety of OTC and patient views regarding the received oncofertility care including motivation for OTC are assessed. Apart from clinical and treatment related factors, we identified genetic susceptibility as an additional risk factor, given the variety in toxicity in similarly treated subjects. International collaboration enabled us to show cytochrome P450 polymorphisms determine inter-individual variation in gonadal damage in the largest cohort of childhood cancer survivors so far (Cancers 2021). A GWAS to uncover new variants responsible for this inter-individual variation is currently pending. Our findings are an important step towards inclusion of these factors in risk prediction models determining patients at risk of chemotherapy-induced gonadal impairment and selection of patients for fertility preservation. 

We are honored that the SIOP scientific board has rewarded this study with a SIOP Young Investigator Award 2021.