David J. Sugarbaker

David John Sugarbaker (August 5, 1953 – August 29, 2018) was an American physician who was chief of the division of general thoracic surgery and the director of the Baylor College of Medicine Lung Institute at CHI St. Luke's Health–Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston, Texas. He was an internationally recognized thoracic surgeon specializing in the treatment of mesothelioma, the surgical management of malignant pleural mesothelioma, and treatment of complex thoracic cancers.

Early life Sugarbaker grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, as one of ten children of Everett Dornbush Sugarbaker (1910–2001), a cancer surgeon, and Gevena Ione (née Van Dyke, 1911–2015), a registered nurse. He was the younger brother of the surgeon Paul Sugarbaker. Sugarbaker spent his high school and college years helping his father in the operating room, visiting patients outside of town, and becoming interested in medicine.

He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in 1975 from Wheaton College in Illinois.

He graduated at the top of his class with his medical degree from Cornell University Medical School in 1979 and married Linda Sterk two weeks before beginning his surgical internship.

Career Sugarbaker began his career in 1988, focusing primarily on pleural mesothelioma. Following the completion of his residency training, Sugarbaker was appointed chief at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where he founded and built the first non-cardiac division of thoracic surgery in the United States. The division grew under his leadership to become the largest of its kind in the United States. Sugarbaker was a leader in the establishment of the Tissue and Blood Repository at Brigham and Women's Hospital. In 1992, Sugarbaker developed the first general thoracic surgical training track in the U.S. and has since trained over 80 residents and placed about two-thirds of his graduates into academic positions. In 2002, he founded the International Mesothelioma Program (IMP) with the central goal of finding a cure for the disease. The program is the largest of its kind and attracts patients from all over the world.

Sugarbaker arrived at the Texas Medical Center (TMC) in 2014 and that same year founded the new Division of General Thoracic Surgery, the Lung Institute, which integrates medical and surgical treatments for benign and malignant non-cardiac thoracic diseases, and the Mesothelioma Treatment Center (MTC), focused on the evaluation and treatment of patients with mesothelioma.

Over time, Sugarbaker had refined the techniques of extrapleural pneumonectomy, developed methods to perform intraoperative heated chemotherapy, and conducted multiple clinical trials to establish the appropriate intraoperative chemotherapies to be delivered. His later research focused on improving drugs for therapy of malignant pleural mesothelioma. The goal of Sugarbaker's project was to uncover potential targets for therapy in cancer through the development of new bioinformatic tools and functional analysis algorithms.

In 2006, Sugarbaker was awarded the inaugural Crystal Ball Clearly Time Award by the Lung Cancer Alliance.

Sugarbaker was a pioneer in the treatment of mesothelioma. He was the first to develop the multimodality therapy for patients with the disease.

Death and legacy Sugarbaker died on August 29, 2018. Dr. Joseph S. Coselli emphasized Dr. Sugarbaker's focus on quality care, commenting, "I was honored to work with him for the last 4 years in the Department of Surgery at BCM ... He was a pioneer and a leader in the treatment of mesothelioma. ... No one else in our lifetime had more impact on the field of thoracic surgery.".