Cicero Urban

Cicero Urban, MD, PhD is Head of the Breast Surgery Department at Hospital Nossa Senhora das Graças and Grupo Oncoclínicas in Curitiba, Brazil, and is one of Latin America's most internationally recognized breast surgical oncologists. He is a global leader in oncoplastic breast surgery and nipple-sparing mastectomy (NSM), having made major contributions to standardizing surgical techniques, defining oncologic safety criteria, and documenting long-term outcomes for these procedures. Dr. Urban was among the first surgeons globally to systematically document oncologic safety, recurrence rates, and aesthetic outcomes of nipple-sparing mastectomy in patients with early-stage breast cancer. His large prospective series and multicenter studies established that NSM achieves equivalent local control to skin-sparing and conventional mastectomy in appropriately selected patients, while dramatically improving body image, quality of life, and patient satisfaction. He developed standardized NSM technique guidelines that have been widely adopted internationally, and his work defining safe indications for NSM — including tumor-to-nipple distance, nipple involvement assessment, and intraoperative frozen section of the retroareolar margin — is referenced in global breast surgery guidelines. Beyond NSM, Dr. Urban has produced landmark contributions to oncoplastic breast-conserving surgery, demonstrating that volume displacement and replacement techniques allow wider excision margins with better cosmesis while maintaining survival outcomes. He is a founding member and past president of the World Oncoplastic Breast Surgery Society (WOBSS) and has led international consensus processes defining oncoplastic surgery training standards. He has trained surgeons across South America, Europe, and Asia and has authored definitive textbooks on oncoplastic technique.