Dr. Marcelo Cypel is a Staff Thoracic Surgeon at University Health Network (UHN) and a Full Professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto. He is the Director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, Surgical Director of the Ajmera Transplant Center (one of top 3 largest transplant centers in North America performing more than 750 transplants per year), and the Surgical Director of the Extracorporeal Life Support program at UHN. In 2005 he started his post-doctoral research fellowship at the Latner Thoracic Surgery Laboratory. During this time, he developed a new method of lung preservation and donor lung repair called Ex Vivo Lung Perfusion (EVLP). This method is now used clinically in Toronto and in many other centers and has significantly increased the number of transplantable lungs.
He subsequently performed a 3-year fellowship in thoracic oncology, cardiac surgery, and lung transplantation at the University of Toronto. During his training, he has received 13 awards, including the McMurrich Award given for the best fundamental science work by any level trainee in the Department of Surgery and the first Annual Zane Cohen Clinical Fellowship Achievement Award. He also published a large number of first and senior author peer-reviewed manuscripts including high impact journals such as Science Translational Medicine and The New England Journal of Medicine. His main clinical interests are in minimal invasive thoracic surgery for lung cancer, treatment of pulmonary metastases, artificial lung devices, lung transplantation, and transplant oncology.
Dr. Cypel was a 2-time awardee of the prestigious Canada Research Chair in Lung Transplantation from the Government of Canada, and he is the principal investigator in very innovative clinical trials, such as the use of uncontrolled donation after cardio-circulatory death for lung transplantation, 10°C lung preservation, and in vivo lung perfusion with chemotherapy to treat patients with lung metastases. He is a Member of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) and a Fellow from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (FRCSC).