Dr. Roderich Schwarz joined the Department of Surgery at the UT Southwestern Medical School and the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in the middle of 2007, to serve as Professor of Surgery and Chairman of the Division of Surgical Oncology. A native of Germany, he completed his medical training at the Medical School in Hannover, Germany, in 1984, and presented his dissertation with a thesis in experimental hepatopathology in 1985. Until 1989, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute in Pittsburgh, PA, and subsequently underwent residency training in General Surgery in the Department of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1994, he started a two-year fellowship training in Surgical Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he has received specialty training for gastrointestinal cancer with Drs. Murray F. Brennan, Alfred M. Cohen, and Leslie H. Blumgart. From 1996 to 2001, he served as Section Head of Upper Gastrointestinal and Pancreatobiliary Surgery at the City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles, California. Subsequently, he led the Pancreatic Cancer Program at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, NJ, from 2001 to 2007. Dr. Schwarz has a special interest in upper gastrointestinal malignancies, including pancreatic, hepatobiliary, and gastric cancer. He has presented numerous talks at national and international meetings, and has authored more than eighty peer reviewed journal articles and several book chapters. His research interests focus on experimental combination therapy for pancreatic and gastric cancer, novel locoregional therapies for liver and bile duct lesions, and minimizing morbidity after major visceral resections. Dr. Schwarz has taken an active role in the design and implementation of experimental multidisciplinary treatment protocols for gastrointestinal cancer at UTSW. Of major interest are: 1. adjuvant combination treatment strategies that incorporate molecular-targeted drugs for growth inhibition and antiangiogenesis with conventional cytotoxic therapy; 2. intraperitoneal treatment with or without surgical cytoreduction; 3. regional intrahepatic chemotherapy after resection / radiofrequency ablation of hepatic metastases. Dr. Schwarz seeks to create a cooperative and productive relationship with physicians who diagnose and treat gastrointestinal cancer. He is available for clinical consultations or direct physician contact at any time.
