Dr Amy Winship completed her PhD in 2016 at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research before receiving a Cancer Council Victoria Postdoctoral Fellowship to expand on her PhD studies to advance understanding of the development and progression of uterine cancer. In 2017, she relocated to the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute to study the importance of numerous different DNA repair pathways for maintaining oocyte (egg) quality and female fertility in response to anti-cancer treatments, environmental toxins and maternal ageing. During this time, she has been awarded an ARC DECRA and NHMRC Early Career Fellowship. Dr Winship is now a Group Leader in reproductive biology at Monash University, having advanced knowledge of endocrine and immune regulators driving ovarian, uterine or placental dysfunction leading to infertility, pregnancy loss, or pregnancy complications.
Research
Cancer therapies, like chemotherapy, can cause devastating side-effects for young female survivors, such as infertility and early menopause. Now, immunotherapies are revolutionising cancer therapy. They activate the patient’s immune system to target and kill tumour cells. Because they are so effective, patients are receiving these drugs before the full spectrum of side-effects have been tested. Since women are often excluded from clinical trials of new cancer therapies, the impacts of immunotherapies on the female reproductive and endocrine systems in particular were unknow.
Dr Winship’s research has begun to address this crucial knowledge gap; recent data have shown for the first time that immunotherapies cause an inflammatory response in the ovaries. This inflammation is damaging enough to kill the eggs stored within, which may have permanent impacts to fertility and hormone production that is necessary to support overall health in girls and women. This finding has been ground-breaking in the field because it has uncovered entirely new interactions between the immune system and the ovary, which were previously unknown.
Additionally, while the fertility preservation field has focused almost exclusively on understanding how cancer treatments damage the ovary, Dr Winship’s research team are world-leading in identifying mechanisms by which different cancer therapies can impair the uterine response to hormones, providing an additional barrier to the establishment and maintenance of healthy pregnancy for female cancer survivors.
The Al & Val Rosenstrauss Fellowship supports current studies which are focused on improving understanding of the precise causes of immunotherapy-induced ovarian damage, as well as defining the potential long-term impacts of immunotherapies on hormone levels, fertility and pregnancy. At the same time, testing will be performed to determine the efficacy of multiple different protection strategies, including tests of an existing drug that is already approved to treat inflammation.