Marco Magalhaes

Dr. Marco Magalhaes is a clinician-scientist, director of the Cancer Invasion and Metastasis Laboratory (CIMlab) at the University of Toronto and assistant professor at the Faculty of Dentistry, cross-appointed to Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and the Institute of Medical Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Magalhaes received his PhD in cell biology at the University of Toronto in 2009 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Cancer Centre (New York, NY) before returning to the University of Toronto to complete a residency in Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology and Oral Medicine. Dr. Magalhaes is currently funded by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Cancer Research Society and has several research projects in oral potentially malignant disorders, oral cancer, and mechanisms of metastasis. His main area of interest is the role of immune cells and mediators in the progression of oral cancer and he has identified novel mechanism linking oral inflammation to oral cancer invasion (Glogauer et al, 2015, Goertzen et al 2018, Chadwick et al 2021). He has characterized TNFα-dependent invasion downstream of TNFR1 activation through a PI3K-dependent pathway and developed novel methods to evaluate invasion and metastatic disease in oral cancer and other types of cancer including gastric cancer. As a clinician-scientist, he manages patients with potentially malignant disorders at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and currently leads prospective clinical research (PROBIO study) to determine molecular and genetic signatures associated with increased risk of malignant transformation. He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, fellow of the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Dentists of Canada.