Lorenzo Ferri is the David S. Mulder Chair in Surgery and a Professor in the Departments of Surgery and Oncology at McGill University in Montreal Canada. A Boston native, Dr Ferri moved north of the border to complete undergraduate, medical studies, and surgical residency at McGill University. During a residency he obtained a PhD investigating neutrophil biology in states of systemic inflammation. Following fellowships in Minimally Invasive Surgery (McGill), Thoracic Surgery (University of Toronto), and Esophageal Surgery (University of Hong Kong) he was recruited back to McGill University in 2005 where he currently director of the division of thoracic surgery and heads the McGill University program in upper gastrointestinal cancer.
Dr Ferri is an independent investigator with active basic science, translational and clinical research programs, all concentrated primarily on malignancies of the chest and foregut with over 90 manuscripts published to date. He runs the Upper Gastrointestinal Cancer Program at McGill University, Canada’s largest and most comprehensive, through which he has spearheaded several investigator initiated prospective clinical trials centered on novel chemotherapeutic regimens for esophageal and gastric adenocarcinoma, primarily in the neo-adjuvant phase. Dr Ferri is the recipient of numerous peer review grants, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Canadian Cancer Society, for his work into the inflammatory basis of cancer metastasis. Through this work he has identified the important role of bacterial antigens - pattern recognition proteins (TLRs and NODs) and host neutrophils/Neutrophil Extracellular Traps in propagating cancer dissemination, thus representing a new paradigm in the metastatic process.