David M. Jablons, M.D.

Biography

Dr. David Jablons  is the Ada Distinguished   Professor in Thoracic Oncology and Chief of General Thoracic Surgery at UCSF. Dr. Jablons is also Program Leader of Thoracic Oncology at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer and Director of the Thoracic Oncology Lab at the adjoining UCSF Cancer Research Center. He has a long record of accomplishments and clinical outreach in lung cancer and mesothelioma and is world-renowned in these fields.

Dr. Jablons was born and raised in New York City. He received his medical degree from Albany Medical College of Union University New York. In his fourth year of medical school, he won a prestigious preceptorship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for clinical science training under Dr. Steven Rosenberg, a world-renowned surgical oncologist and tumor immunologist. This experience kindled his lifelong interest in translational science.

Dr. Jablons began his surgical residency at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. He then completed his surgical oncology fellowship at NCI, focusing on tumor immunology and immunotherapy.   Dr. Jablons received his advanced cardiothoracic training as a fellow under Dr. Wayne Isom at Cornell Medical Center (now New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center), and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center under Dr. Robert Ginsburg. Dr. Jablons also trained with Dr. David Sugarbaker in lung transplantation at Brigham & Women's Hospital.
 
In 1995, Dr. Jablons was recruited by UCSF to build a program in thoracic surgery and thoracic oncology. Upon his promotion to Chief of the Section of General Thoracic Surgery in 1997, Dr. Jablons redirected the focus of his research to molecular biology and genomics. He successfully recruited Liang You, M.D. Ph.D., Zhidong Xu Ph.D., and Biao He, Ph.D. to the Thoracic Oncology Laboratory to pursue   target discovery and novel therapies for lung cancer and mesothelioma and other cancers.   Key projects include isolation of lung cancer stems cells, the Wnt pathway and mesothelioma, inflammation in lung cancinogenesis and lung cancer system genetics.

Dr. Jablons was among the first to recognize the importance of tissue banking, the preservation of tissue from patients undergoing surgery. Over the past decade,   Dr. Jablons and his team have accumulated almost 1,000 specimens of tumor and matched normal tissue, creating one of the largest thoracic tissue banks in the world. This has been extremely important for research into the cancer biology of tumors.

Dr. Jablons is also a world leader in clinical outreach. He founded the UCSF Thoracic Oncology Conference, the oldest such program of its kind, co-chairs the annual UCSF Clinical Cancer Update and the biannual Pan Pacific Lung Cancer Conference.   He is also the co-Chair of the 13th World Conference on Lung Cancer to be held in San Francisco in 2009.   David Jablons is a member of numerous professional organizations including the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the American College of Chest Physicians, the American Association for Cancer Research and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). He has published over one hundred peer-reviewed articles and is the principal investigator on an NIH R01 grant investigating the Wnt Pathway mesothelioma.