Marc Colaco, MD, MBA, Joins the UPMC Children’s Division of Pediatric Urology

Marc Colaco, MD, MBA, joined the Division of Pediatric Urology at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh on Sept. 1.

Dr. Colaco earned his medical degree from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and his MBA from Rutgers Business School through a joint-degree program, completed his urology residency at Wake Forest University, and then completed his pediatric urology fellowship at UPMC Children’s. He spent the next five years on the faculty at Wake Forest, where he was assistant residency program director, before returning to Pittsburgh.

Because his father is a general surgeon, Dr. Colaco always assumed he would become a surgeon, too. In medical school, he was drawn to urology and worked closely with the department chair, a pediatric urologist. He began residency at Wake Forest already planning to subspecialize in pediatric urology and trained there under a chair who was also a pediatric urologist.

"I like working with children, and from a surgical standpoint they're generally healthy and heal well, so the challenge is usually the anatomy itself," Dr. Colaco says. "Most of what we treat is congenital, and no two malformations or manifestations of a condition are exactly the same. You have to understand the anatomy in front of you and find the best surgical treatment and approaches to reconstruction for that child."

Returning to UPMC Children’s

At Wake Forest, Dr. Colaco practiced in a combined adult and pediatric hospital. UPMC Children's offered the opportunity to return to a hospital devoted entirely to children, with the full range of pediatric specialties that urology works alongside.

“Most pediatric specialists want to be in a major children’s hospital, where there is more opportunity and more complex cases,” Dr. Colaco says. “We see a lot of very complex pediatric urology here, which is what I experienced during my fellowship, and we do a lot of research, which I’m looking forward to getting back into. It’s also nice to come back to a hospital, health care system, city, and a dedicated group of people you already know.”

Complex Care and Robotic Surgery

Dr. Colaco’s clinical interests focus on the complex care inherent in pediatric urology, in particular patients living with spina bifida and neurogenic bladder. Dr. Colaco sees patients in the UPMC Children’s multidisciplinary Pediatric Spina Bifida Clinic, which meets weekly and brings pediatric urology together with orthopaedics, neurosurgery, physical medicine and rehabilitation and other disciplines to provide comprehensive and longitudinal care for this patient population.

In the future, one of the areas of research Dr. Colaco hopes to focus on is the pediatric spina bifida population, beginning with a multicenter study of bowel habits in this group that the division is currently in discussions to join. On the medical education side, Dr. Colaco will be working with and mentoring the division’s fellows and he plans to become involved with the urology residency program. Additionally, during his time in the division as a fellow, Dr. Colaco had the opportunity to travel to Africa on international medical missions with division colleagues Rajeev Chaudhry, MD, and Francis X. Schneck, MD, through International Volunteers in Urology (IVUmed), a nonprofit organization whose volunteer teams operate on patients and train local surgeons in low-resource countries around the world.

“This experience was both one of learning, and giving back to the field, and I’m looking forward to being involved in future international outreach efforts. Dr. Schneck and Dr. Chaudhry have been doing this in our division for a long time, which shows their commitment but also our division and hospital’s commitment to helping those in need far from our western Pennsylvania,” Dr. Colaco says.

Robotic surgery is a large part of Dr. Colaco’s practice, as it is for the entire division. He has performed robotic procedures in children as young as 6 months, and colleagues in the division have operated on infants as young as 3 months with robotic-assisted approaches.

“For most of the kidney surgery we do, especially pyeloplasty, robotic surgery has become the standard of care, and you would need a very specific reason to do it otherwise,” Dr. Colaco says. “We’re doing more bladder surgery robotically as well. Children have smaller incisions, less pain, and shorter hospital stays, and outcomes have been shown to be equivalent. If you can get the same result with less pain and a shorter stay, it’s an easy decision to make as a surgeon.”

Learn More

Learn more about the Division of Pediatric Urology at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.