Thomas Habermann, MD

• Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma

Dr. Thomas Habermann is Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester and current Chair-Elect of the Lymphoma Research Foundation (LRF) Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). His career as a lymphoma researcher encompasses a wide variety of projects, from investigations into new therapies and the biology of lymphoma to studies that identify factors affecting patient quality of life and the cost-effectiveness of their treatment. “I have come to appreciate what I refer to as ‘the continuum’ of many lymphoma subtypes,” Dr. Habermann says, when asked about how his clinical research and epidemiology research impact each other, “It is clear that we cannot study the totality of a lymphoma subtype in a single clinical trial.” His epidemiology work includes establishing the infrastructure for databases and tissue banks such as the Mayo Clinic Lymphoma database (with records of over 25,000 patients) and a database that integrates the Lymphoma SPORE data (with records of over 8,000 patients in roughly a decade of collection), which has allowed Dr. Habermann and his collaborators to make observations based on the blood, tissue, and clinical information of groups of patients that far exceed the enrollment of most clinical trials. “The merging of both clinical trials and epidemiology is like the word quantum which can mean two things,” he adds. “As a noun, it can refer to a large amount (epidemiology) or it can mean the smallest amount of something that can exist independently (clinical trials).”