Sabrina Wurzba (PhD)
Associate Professor
DDS, MSc, PhD
Currently supervising students
Carcinogenesis, Cancer progression, Metastasis signaling, Preclinical and animal models, Genetic, Genomic and Epigenomic, Target and Drug Discovery
Head and neck cancer genomics and translational applications; innovative concepts of precision/personalized medicine both in the context of therapeutics and prevention; technologies to identify, understand and develop "smart" drugs against invasive head and neck cancer cells and their tissue microenvironment; drug resistance mechanisms associated with treatment failure and recurrences.
Dr Wurzba DDS, MSc, PhD is an assistant professor at the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at McGill University and project director at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research - Segal Cancer Center. She obtained her DDS degree from University of Sao Paulo State, Brazil and her MSc and PhD in Pathology and Molecular Biology at University of Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil). She did a postdoctoral training in Genetic/Genomics in Oncology under supervision of Dr Luiz Paulo Kowalski, a renowned expert at AC Camargo Cancer Center, gaining a vast experience in the field. In 2010, she joined the ENT Department at the Jewish General Hospital where she continued her research focus on improving outcomes for patients with head and neck cancer through optimized detection and use of personalized targeted therapeutics. She pursued a complementary training in Experimental Medicine. In collaboration with Dr Moulay Alaoui-Jamali, a professor and scientist from the Segal Cancer Center and Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, she carried out fundamental research to understand the mechanism of tumor progression including the establishment of orthotropic metastatic models using tissues samples from patients with head and neck cancer. In 2014, Dr. Wurzba became an assistant professor in the Department, where she is now leading basic and translational research with a primary goal to improve prevention, early tumor detection, and discover alternative therapeutic approaches for patients with advanced disease.
Dr Wurzba’s research has been published in several peer-reviewed biomedical and medical international journals and she has contributed to book chapters related to the field of oncology science. She has been presented at national and international conferences, including the American Association Head and Neck Society, the Canadian Society of Otolaryngology, and the International Academy of Oral Oncology. She also has been serving on several national and international grant panels, editorial boards of biomedical/medical journals.
