John Mendelsohn, MD 

John Mendelsohn, MD, has been a leader in cancer care and research since he began practicing medicine in 1963. After studying under James D. Watson, PhD, and receiving a Fulbright scholarship, Dr. Mendelsohn went on to become the founding director of Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health in 1978. Dr. Mendelsohn also served as the chairman of medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 11 years, and president of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center from 1996 to 2011. Dr. Mendelsohn was also the director of the Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Dr. Mendelsohn’s innovative research has transformed the landscape of cancer care. He collaborated with Gordon Sato, PhD, to develop a revolutionary treatment for colon and head and neck cancers, commercially known as Cetuximab or Erbitux. This drug, based on his groundbreaking research in cell growth, targets cancer-causing proteins to inhibit cancer cell growth and serves as the foundation for anti-receptor therapy, which disrupts cancer cell signaling. This research is now the foundation for a number of cancer drugs and treatment plans. Cetuximab was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2004, and in just more than a decade it has been used to treat almost half a million patients.

Dr. Mendelsohn has been recognized with a number of prestigious awards over the course of his distinguished career, including a Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal (2005) and the Joseph H. Burchenal Clinical Research Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (1999). He was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Mendelsohn passed away on January 7, 2019 at age 82 in Houston, Texas.