Contact: Monty Jones, (512) 499-4363

Date: May 9, 1996

Biography: John Mendelsohn, M.D.

John Mendelsohn, M.D.

Dr. John Mendelsohn, who will assume The University of Texas M.D. Anderson presidency this summer, is chairman of the Department of Medicine and holds the Winthrop Rockefeller Chair in Medical Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is nationally recognized for integrating basic biomedical research with clinical studies, for organizing collaborative programs between industry and academic institutions and for personal research in the understanding of how growth factors regulate cell proliferation.

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Dr. Mendelsohn received his medical degree cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1963. He interned and took his residency training in medicine at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He was a research associate at the National Institutes of Health and completed a fellowship in hematology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also was an instructor in medicine.

From 1970 until 1985, Dr. Mendelsohn was on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego, rising from assistant professor to full professor in less than nine years. He was the prime force in creating and funding the University of California at San Diego Cancer Center and served as its founding director from 1976 until he went to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1985.

Dr. Mendelsohn reorganized and expanded the Department of Medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. For five years, he was co-head of the center's Program in Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He also is a professor and vice-chairman of medicine at Cornell University Medical College and an attending physician at both Memorial and New York Hospitals.

In his own research, Dr. Mendelsohn has made seminal contributions to advance understanding of signal transduction pathways mediated by activated receptors for growth factors. His laboratory at the University of California at San Diego produced monoclonal antibodies that inhibited tumor cell proliferation and that were licensed to three companies. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering, he has expanded his studies and conducted clinical trials that show dramatic effects of combining monoclonal antibodies with chemotherapy for patients with lung, breast and other cancers. He has authored 175 papers, chapters and review articles on growth factors in scientific journals and textbooks. He is editor-in-chief of The Molecular Basis of Cancer and the founding editor-in-chief of Clinical Cancer Research.

For numerous community contributions, Dr. Mendelsohn was chosen "Headliner of the Year" in Medicine by the San Diego Press Association in 1985. He and his wife, Anne, have three sons, and jointly participate in many civic activities. He also is a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine and is on the Board of Richard Lounsbery Foundation, which funds innovative approaches to education.

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