Associate Professor David Gyorki

David Gyorki is a general surgeon specialising in surgical oncology with clinical expertise in the management of patients with melanoma, breast cancer and soft tissue sarcoma. As a surgical oncologist, his focus is on ensuring the best possible outcome for his patients. He currently has public hospital appointments at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the Austin Hospital and sees patients in the private system through Cancer Specialists.

David liaises closely with his colleagues in medical oncology and radiation oncology from the outset to ensure the optimal treatment plan is personalised for each patient. He has specialist training in the management of local and advanced melanoma throughout the body, including melanoma of the head and neck. As part of the treatment of patients with localised melanoma, he performs sentinel lymph node biopsy, a procedure which provides the most accurate prognostic information. He also performs surgery for metastatic disease for selected patients with advanced melanoma, in consultation with a multidisciplinary team.

With experience in the management of patients with early as well as locally advanced breast cancer David is able to use a wide range of surgical strategies to ensure an optimal cancer outcome while also aiming for the best possible cosmetic result for the patient, often in collaboration with his plastic surgical colleagues.

David undertook general surgical training at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne as well as at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. After completing his training in Australia, he pursued further specialist training in Surgical Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, USA, one of the world’s foremost and most established cancer centres.

There are currently many exciting advances in the treatment of patients with melanoma with a number of new agents coming to the clinic. David's clinical research interests are in identifying ways to combine surgery with these therapies to optimise management of patients with advanced melanoma. He is also interested in identifying which patients can potentially be treated with less surgery and together with his surgical colleagues at Peter Mac, he is an associate investigator in the MSLT-2 trial, a large international trial studying whether patients with melanoma in the sentinel lymph node require further lymph node surgery or not.

During his surgical training, David spent two years undertaking a doctorate at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research studying the interaction of breast stem cells and the immune system. His research was awarded the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium Basic Science Scholarship at the world’s premier breast cancer conference. David is now investigating the role of the immune system in the management of melanoma and has secured a competitive research grant to study the immune cells located within melanomas.