HeadShot

Dr. Vishal Navani

MA (Oxon) MBBS MRCP FRACP

Positions

Assistant Professor - Medicine

Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Oncology

Medical Oncologist

Arthur J.E. Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre

Member

Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute

Contact information

Phone number

Office: 403.521.3688

Location

Tom Baker Cancer Centre: Physicians Offices CC107

Preferred method of communication

Administrative Assistant

Adrianna Braun

Email: adrianna.braun@ahs.ca
Office: 403.521.3866

Background

Educational Background

Master of Arts Medical Sciences, University of Oxford,

Bachelor of Medicine Bachelor of Surgery Imperial College London,

Member of the Royal Colleges of Physicians UK Internal Medicine,

Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians Medical Oncology,

Biography

Dr. Navani is a staff medical oncologist at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Calgary. He previously graduated from Oxford and Imperial College London. He holds both Membership of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. 

He is the lead for Glans Look, Canada’s largest lung cancer database and his award winning research has been published extensively in high impact journals, including JAMA Oncology, The Lancet Oncology and European Urology. He has gained several hundred thousand dollars in competitive grant funding and has mentored several post-graduate medicine trainees to international oncology ASCO merit awards. He has been an invited speaker for several national conferences including recently moderating the Canadian Kidney Cancer Forum and chairing Oncology Education's "Best of Precision Oncology".

He has contributed as a clinical expert to CADTH national drug reimbursement decisions and provides clinical development advice to a number of life science companies, alongside being a member of the Canadian Real World Cancer Evaluation platform clinical advisory group. He serves as the departmental thoracic oncology research group lead in Calgary and sits on the Cancer Control Alberta IIT award review panel.

Research

Areas of Research

Novel therapies in solid tumours
Novel Therapies in Solid Organ Tumours

Real World Evidence and its role in informing therapeutic decision making

My academic focus includes the interrogation of large real world datasets spanning tumour streams in order to generate practical insights that can be used in the clinic. I am director at Glans Look, one of North America’s largest lung cancer databases and oversee a broad programe of research here that includes fellows, research coordinators nd programme managers with dozens of published manuscripts and competitive funding received.

My work on the International Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma Database (IMDC), collaborating with founder and division lead Prof. Daniel Heng, has been extensively published in high impact journals such as JAMA Oncology and won multiple academic awards, including an ASCO Merit Award. I have helped to curate and develop the database on an ongoing basis including expanding the translational biomarker based components of our research, with funded Marathon of Hope grants supporting this.

Novel Immunotherapy Approaches to treat Solid Tumours

Active clinical trialist across all phases of clinical development, attempting to identify and validate novel therapeutic targets. We work with co-operative group and industry partners to recruit patients on potentially practice-changing studies in areas of high unmet need, with a focus on lung and genitourinary malignancies. Some highlights of this research include:

- Invited commentaries in the Lancet Oncology & Journal of Clinical Oncology

- Opening the first novel immunotherapeutic study examining TIGIT as a target in Calgary

- Providing clinical development advice to >30 sponsors & CROs to improve protocol design, recruitment and statistical plans

Publications