Marcelo Cypel is a Staff Thoracic Surgeon at University Health Network (UHN) and Professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto. He is the Surgical Director of the Ajmera Transplant Center and the director of the ECLS program at UHN. He received his MD in 1999 and completed his general surgery and thoracic surgery residency program in 2004. 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 1st Annual Zane Cohen Clinical Fellowship Achievement Award. He also achieved a large number of 1st and senior author peer review publications including high impact journals such as Science TM 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 and lung transplantation.
Dr. Cypel currently holds 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 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).
