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Thoracic Oncology Program »  Meet the Team »  Program Leader »  David M. Jablons, M.D.
David M. Jablons, M.D., FACS

David M. Jablons, M.D., FACS

  • Professor of Surgery
  • Chief, General Thoracic Surgery
  • Nan T. McEvoy Distinguished Professor of Thoracic Surgical Oncology
  • Ada Distinguished Professor of Thoracic Oncology
  • Program Leader Thoracic Oncology
  • Director, Thoracic Oncology Laboratory,
  • UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center

Contact Information

Academic Office
500 Parnassus Ave., MUW 405, Box 0118
San Francisco, CA 94143
Tel: 415-514-0262
Email: [email protected]
Assistant: TBD
Thoracic Surgery and Oncology Clinic:
1600 Divisadero St., 4th Floor, Box 1674
San Francisco, CA 94115
Clinic:415-885-3882
Fax: 415-353-7151

 

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  • Yale University, B.A., American Literature, 1979
  • Albany Medical College of Union University, M.D., 1984
  • Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, Oakland, CA, General Surgery, 1984-85
  • Tufts University/New England Medical Center, General Surgery, 1985-86, 89-91
  • Weill Cornell University Medical Center, Cardiothoracic Surgery, 1991-93
  • NCI/NIH, Surgery Branch, Surgical Oncology, 1986-89
  • Brigham & Women's Hospital, Lung Transplantation, 1992
  • New York Hospital/Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Thoracic Surgery, 1992-93
  • American Board of Surgery
  • American Board of Thoracic Surgery
  • Thoracic Oncology Program
  • Member, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
  • Inflammation in lung carcinogenesis
  • Study of "systems genetics" in thoracic malignancies
  • Isolation of lung cancer stems cells
  • Clinical outcomes research
  • Discovery of novel therapeutic targets in in thoracic malignancies
  • Early Detection and Screening
  • Investigation of signal transduction pathways including Wnt, Hedgehog, and Hippo in lung cancer and mesothelioma
  • Lung cancer epigenetics and emerging biomarkers
  • Next generation sequencing
  • Prognostic molecular multi-gene assays in Early-Stage NSCLC

David M. Jablons M.D., FACS is Professor and Chief of the Section of General Thoracic Surgery at UCSF, and Program Leader of Thoracic Oncology.  Dr. Jablons is also Ada Distinguished Professor in Thoracic Oncology and Nan T. McEvoy Distinguished Professor of Thoracic Surgical Oncology. Dr. Jablons is Director of the Thoracic Oncology Lab, one of the largest in the Department of Surgery, with seven principal investigators, an enviable portfolio of NIH grants, and state-of-art-equipment. Utilizing next generation sequencing and leveraging one of the largest thoracic tissue banks in the world, the lab has compiled an enviable record of scientific discovery and invention including a life-saving prognostic assay that informs the decision for providing adjuvant therapy to early-stage lung cancer patients.

Dr. Jablons received his medical degree from Albany Medical College. During medical school, he was awarded an NCI preceptorship allowing him to train under Steven Rosenberg, a world-renowned surgeon and tumor immunologist. This experience kindled Dr. Jablons lifelong interest in translational and precision medicine. Dr. Jablons then completed his general surgery residency at Tufts-New England Medical Center and his thoracic surgery residency at what is now New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. His mentors included Robert Ginsburg at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and David Sugarbaker at Brigham & Women's Hospital, both world-renown thoracic surgical oncologists. Dr. Jablons also served as a Navy commander while Chief of Thoracic Surgery at the Oakland Naval Hospital. In 1997, he was named Chief of General Thoracic Surgery at UCSF.

Dr. Jablons is a highly accomplished thoracic surgeon, widely sought out by patients in the Bay Area and world-wide. One patient, Bonnie J. Addario, after recovering from an arduous lung cancer surgery, started a foundation bearing her name she co-founded with Dr. Jablons. Today, the Addario Foundation is one of the leading underwriters of lung cancer research.  Dr. Jablons has also been a dedicated teacher and outstanding mentor for both for clinical fellows and surgical residents, the latter including Dan Raz and Johannes Kratz, protégés with an enviable and prolific record of publications who helped spearhead development of predictive and prognostic tools for lung cancer treatment in the lab.  

Dr. Jablons has been a trailblazer in educational outreach, co-founding the UCSF Thoracic Oncology Conference, an annual symposium that provided expert training for thousands of community surgeons for over a decade. He also was instrumental in establishing the China Clinical Trials Consortium to find more effective treatments for lung cancer, and to ameliorate the epidemic of lung cancer in China. In 2009, he led the effort to bring World Conference on Lung Cancer to San Francisco, the preeminent event in the field, in which he served as co-Chair. 

He 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). Highly respected by his peers, Dr. Jablons was named to the list of U.S. News "America's Top Doctors," a distinction reserved for the top 1% of physicians in the nation for a given specialty. Dr. Jablons was recently inducted into the American Surgical Society, the nation's most prestigious. 

  Award  
  Confired By    
  Date    
  • Surgical Resident Teaching Award
  • University of California, San Francisco
  • 2001
  • Surgical Resident Teaching Award
  • University of California, San Francisco
  • 1999
  • The Thoracic Oncology Lab focuses on drug target discovery, commercialization of novel therapeutics and development of genomic assays based on predictive and prognostic biomarkers.

    Translational Co-Lead: Dr. Jablons is Director of the Thoracic Oncology Lab focusing on molecular therapeutics, molecular diagnostics, systems biology, systems genetics, and bench-to-bedside drug discovery. His lab employs state of the art technology such as next generation sequencing, synthetic chemistry and 3Dcomputer simulation for drug discovery and leverages one of the largest thoracic tissue banks in the world. Training experience: Dr. Jablons has mentored nearly 100 students, post docs, fellows, and junior and midlevel faculty for the past 25 years at UCSF, many of whom have since achieved significant advances in lung cancer research and clinical care.

    T32 trainees can avail themselves of numerous ongoing oncology projects in the Thoracic Oncology Laboratory, including pre-basic science and novel target drugs research, actual small molecule by design testing (in vitro and in vivo), clinical trial development and execution.
    Data provided by UCSF Profiles, powered by CTSI
    • Inflammation and Lung Carcinogenesis
      Sponsor:
      Sponsor ID:
      Funding Period:
      May 2008
      -
      Mar 2014
      Principal Investigator
    • The Wnt Pathway in Malignant Mesothelioma
      Sponsor:
      Sponsor ID:
      Funding Period:
      Mar 2005
      -
      Feb 2010
      Principal Investigator
    MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS FROM A TOTAL OF 267
    Data provided by UCSF Profiles, powered by CTSI
    1. Johnson DH, Fehrenbacher L, Novotny WF, Herbst RS, Nemunaitis JJ, Jablons DM, Langer CJ, DeVore RF, Gaudreault J, Damico LA, Holmgren E, Kabbinavar F. Randomized Phase II Trial Comparing Bevacizumab Plus Carboplatin and Paclitaxel With Carboplatin and Paclitaxel Alone in Previously Untreated Locally Advanced or Metastatic Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer. J Clin Oncol. 2023 May 01; 41(13):2305-2312. View in PubMed
    2. Woodard GA, Ding V, Cho C, Brand NR, Kratz JR, Jones KD, Jablons DM. Comparative genomics between matched solid and lepidic portions of semi-solid lung adenocarcinomas. Lung Cancer. 2023 06; 180:107211. View in PubMed
    3. Hysenaj L, Little S, Kulhanek K, Magnen M, Bahl K, Gbenedio OM, Prinz M, Rodriguez L, Andersen C, Rao AA, Shen A, Lone JC, Lupin-Jimenez LC, Bonser LR, Serwas NK, Mick E, Khalid MM, Taha TY, Kumar R, Li JZ, Ding VW, Matsumoto S, Maishan M, Sreekumar B, Simoneau C, Nazarenko I, Tomlinson MG, Khan K, von Gottberg A, Sigal A, Looney MR, Fragiadakis GK, Jablons DM, Langelier CR, Matthay M, Krummel M, Erle DJ, Combes AJ, Sil A, Ott M, Kratz JR, Roose JP. SARS-CoV-2 infection of airway organoids reveals conserved use of Tetraspanin-8 by Ancestral, Delta, and Omicron variants. Stem Cell Reports. 2023 03 14; 18(3):636-653. View in PubMed
    4. Lee JC, Liu S, Wang Y, Liang Y, Jablons DM. MK256 is a novel CDK8 inhibitor with potent antitumor activity in AML through downregulation of the STAT pathway. Oncotarget. 2022 11 02; 13:1217-1236. View in PubMed
    5. Kratz JR, Li JZ, Tsui J, Lee JC, Ding VW, Rao AA, Mann MJ, Chan V, Combes AJ, Krummel MF, Jablons DM. Genetic and immunologic features of recurrent stage I lung adenocarcinoma. Sci Rep. 2021 12 08; 11(1):23690. View in PubMed
    6. View All Publications

     

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