Thomas M. Habermann MD

Thomas M. Habermann, MD, is Professor of Medicine and Consultant in the Division of Hematology in the Department of Internal Medicine at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center.

Dr. Habermann received his medical degree from Creighton University before completing his residency and fellowship at Mayo Clinic’s Rochester campus. He joined the Mayo faculty in the 1980s, and began to build the lymphoma program.

Dr. Habermann has helped advance the science of studying this disease as a co-author on papers in 21 different drugs before their approval by the US Food and Drug Administration, including rituximab, lenalidomide, and ibrutinib. He was the principal investigator of the intergroup R-CHOP trial that incorporated rituximab into the CHOP regimen for DLBCL, the first time in 25 years that the standard of care for DLBCL was changed.

Dr. Habermann’s career as a lymphoma researcher includes a plethora 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. His epidemiology work includes establishing the infrastructure for databases and tissue banks, such as the Mayo Clinic Lymphoma database and a database that integrates the Lymphoma SPORE data. This work has allowed Dr. Habermann and his collaborators to make crucial observations based on the blood, tissue, and clinical information of groups of patients that far exceed the enrollment of most clinical trials.

Dr. Habermann is a Value Pathways Task Force Member of the NCCN B-Cell Lymphomas Panel.