Kiran Turaga, MD, MPH, is chief of Surgical Oncology for Yale Medicine. He specializes in cancers that are difficult to treat using conventional surgical treatments. These include advanced tumors, such as those involving critical structures, or those that have spread to other parts of the body, including the lining of the abdomen (peritoneum). He is widely considered an expert in the treatment of gastrointestinal cancers, peritoneal mesothelioma, and metastatic soft tissue cancers (melanoma/sarcoma).

Dr. Turaga says he became a surgical oncologist after seeing the impact of cancer and the immense suffering it causes patients and their families. “I have always been someone who has taken on challenges, and I truly believe that human suffering could be reduced if all of us focused our efforts on the biggest problems that face us,” he says.

Cancer is very personal to him. “Both my father and my grandfather died of cancer,” he says. “Every day, I come to work with the resolve to make things better for my patients and their families. The courage that cancer patients and their caregivers demonstrate every day reminds me that we need to hurry up and find a way to cure cancer.”

New technologies are contributing to increasingly better cancer care for patients, Dr. Turaga says. These include laparoscopic and robotic approaches to removing cancer, as well as minimally invasive ways of treating cancer using radiation and interventional oncology.

Dr. Turaga is widely considered to be a thought leader in the management of oligometastatic cancer, in which the disease has spread only to one or a few areas of the body beyond where it originated, and an expert in regional perfusion, including hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy. This technique delivers high doses of heated chemotherapy directly to abdominal organs to kill cancer cells that may remain after surgical removal of visible tumors.

“I can use these approaches to help patients live longer, lead healthier lives and focus on the things that really matter.”

Dr. Turaga focuses his research on the development of novel diagnostics and therapeutics for oligometastatic cancer and is currently the principal investigator for several clinical trials exploring the interface of immunotherapy and liquid biopsy in the surgical management of cancer. He lives in New Haven with his wife and two children.