John Mendelsohn, a physician-scientist and hospital administrator who pioneered a new form of cancer therapy before growing the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center into one of the world’s preeminent cancer hospitals, died Jan. 7 at his home in Houston. He was 82.
As just the third president in MD Anderson’s 55-year history, Dr. Mendelsohn helped steer the Houston institution toward international renown, building it into a formidable center for research, education and patient care.
It was a remarkable turnaround for a hospital that was facing severe budget cuts and low morale when he took the job in 1996. The institution had hacked $90 million from its annual budget, and financial consultants had recommended additional cuts, including the shuttering of entire departments.
Dr. Mendelsohn ignored their advice and embarked instead on an ambitious expansion effort. By the time he stepped down in 2011, MD Anderson had doubled its staff, quintupled the size of its facilities, increased its fundraising almost tenfold and grown hospital revenue from $726 million to $3.1 billion.
The hospital also began granting degrees in biomedical and health fields; developed teaching affiliations with schools in Europe, Asia and South America; and renewed its commitment to patient care, instituting a policy in which patients saw doctors within four days of calling for an appointment.
Its growth was fueled in large part by Dr. Mendelsohn himself, who as the face of the hospital spent about 23 nights a month fundraising and socializing at parties, according to one Wall Street Journal account, after putting in 12-hour days at MD Anderson.
In the last five years of his tenure, U.S. News & World Report named MD Anderson the country’s finest cancer hospital, ahead of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, where Dr. Mendelsohn had served as chairman of the medicine department before moving to Houston.
“His firsthand experience with the pain, suffering and sometimes futility of cancer treatment really informed his whole approach to leadership,” Peter WT Pisters, MD Anderson’s current president, said in an interview. Dr. Mendelsohn, he added, “was the architect behind the advancement of what we now know as personalized cancer medicine. His work allows us to match treatments to the biology of an individual patient’s tumor.”
Dr. Mendelsohn’s work on personalized treatments began in the 1980s, when he was founding director of the University of California at San Diego’s cancer center. When research suggested that a group of proteins known as growth factors played a key role in the spread of cancer, Dr. Mendelsohn and a colleague, biologist Gordon H. Sato, proposed using an antibody to try to block one of the most intriguing of those proteins, epidermal growth factor.
“We just thought, ‘Let’s stick a piece of chewing gum in our lock so the key can’t get in,’ ” Dr. Mendelsohn told the New York Times in 2004.
His team studied thousands of antibodies, according to a Memorial Sloan Kettering tribute, before isolating one in 1984 that prevented the protein from binding with a receptor on the outside of cancer cells, effectively halting the proliferation of those cancers.
Dubbed C-225, after the number of the laboratory well in which it was found, it inspired other researchers and pharmaceutical companies to pursue other cancer treatments with similar precision, and formed the basis of cetuximab, also known by the trade name Erbitux.
After years of testing, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug for the treatment of colorectal cancer in 2004 and for head and neck cancer in 2006. The drug was also “extremely important” in developing treatments for lung cancer, said Larry Norton, an oncologist at Sloan Kettering. He added that Dr. Mendelsohn also played a key role in the development of Herceptin, a drug that “totally transformed the treatment of breast and many other cancers.”
For Dr. Mendelsohn, the drugs were just a few more steps in the battle to transform cancer into a treatable disease, akin to pneumonia or tuberculosis.
“We’ll never get rid of cancer completely; there are too many genetic issues for that to happen,” he once told the Dallas Morning News. “But our target is to eliminate cancer as a major health problem.”
John Mendelsohn was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 31, 1936. His mother was a homemaker, and his father sold suspenders and men’s belts.
Dr. Mendelsohn was studying physics and chemistry at Harvard University when he “found out I liked people as much as math, maybe more,” he said in an interview with the American Association for Cancer Research. Switching to a medicine track, he knocked on the door of James D. Watson, a new faculty member who went on to share a Nobel Prize for identifying the double-helix structure of DNA, and became his first undergraduate researcher.
Dr. Mendelsohn received his bachelor’s degree in 1958 and graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1963. After completing research fellowships, he joining UCSD in 1970, moving to Memorial Sloan Kettering in 1985.
In 2002 he weathered a pair of corporate meltdowns, while serving as a board member with Enron, the energy giant that collapsed amid allegations of widespread accounting fraud, and ImClone Systems, a biotech company embroiled in an insider-trading scandal centered on the Erbitux cancer drug.
Both controversies left him relatively unscathed. Dr. Mendelsohn said he had done nothing wrong and was never accused of impropriety, although he faced criticism from members of Congress who said he and other board members had not done enough to supervise their companies.
That same year, The Washington Post reported that MD Anderson had tested Erbitux on patients without telling them its president had a financial stake in the drug. Dr. Mendelsohn told The Post that the hospital had recently changed its policies to avoid similar ethical concerns in the future, saying, “I don’t want to take any chances that a patient will feel they’ve been deceived at MD Anderson.”
After retiring as president, Dr. Mendelsohn returned to MD Anderson in 2012 to become a director of the Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy. He also served as a senior fellow in health and technology policy at the Baker Institute, a public policy center at Rice University. Previously, he had served as a health policy adviser to President George H.W. Bush, who last year called him “one of the leading gladiators in the war against cancer — innovative, relentless, fearless,” according to the Houston Chronicle.
Survivors include his wife of nearly 60 years, the former Anne Charles, a research chemist turned educator and TV producer, of Houston; three sons, Andrew Mendelsohn of London, Eric Mendelsohn of Summit, N.J., and Jeffrey Mendelsohn of San Francisco; and eight grandchildren.
As part of his overhaul of MD Anderson, Dr. Mendelsohn supervised a remodeling that turned the hospital into something resembling a fine hotel, with waterfall features, a vaulted atrium, three dozen aquariums and jigsaw puzzles scattered throughout its rooms.
The changes were not simply cosmetic, Dr. Mendelsohn told the Dallas Morning News, but provided comfort to patients and their families. At the same time, he added, the core of cancer treatment remained the same: “One doctor dealing with one patient, one at a time, making them feel like they’re the most important person in the world.”
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