Erik Schadde, MD, FACS, FEBS (HPB)

Erik Schadde, MD, FACS, FEBS (HPB), trained in general surgery in Boston, in transplantation at the University of Wisconsin Madison, was an attending in transplant surgery at University of Kansas Kansas City and became the head of liver transplantation at Saint Louis University Medical Center in 2009.

To develop his clinical and research interests in complex liver surgery involving induction of liver regeneration, Schadde moved to the Swiss HPB center of the University of Zurich in 2010 as a consultant surgeon and rapidly became the head of the HPB fellowship program there. He performed the first procedures of a novel method to induce rapid liver regeneration at the Zurich center for liver surgery, ALPPS. The procedure was pioneered by a group of German surgeons to help patients with extensive tumors who would otherwise not be candidates for liver surgery. Based on the success of the innovation, Schadde, together with his mentor Pierre-Alain Clavien, initiated a worldwide registry to assess the outcomes of this innovation and is regarded to be an expert of complex liver surgery involving the induction of liver regeneration prior to resection. He has authored several papers on the ALPPS procedures, is the authors of several textbook chapters on liver surgery and is a reviewer to a number of international journals in the field of hepatobiliary and transplant surgery, as well as a speaker on this topic in national and international venues. In 2015, he was recruited to Rush University to help with the development of a new center for complex liver surgery in Chicago. In his laboratory research, he is specifically interested in using the methods to induce liver growth in transplantation to make small pieces of donor organs into livers big enough to support a liver transplant recipient.

Schadde is involved with Rush’s development of pioneering, life-changing treatments for fibrolamellar carcinoma, a rare pediatric cancer. Rush physicians employ novel immunotherapeutic combinations and portal vein/double vein embolization, a cutting-edge technique used at Rush in greater volume than anywhere in North America. Rush also treats the largest number of all cases of this rare type of cancer in the United States.

In 2019 Schadde initiated the Chicago LIVERMET Symposium, hosted at Rush, which featured the latest innovations in the treatment of liver metastases. The conference was attended by expert clinicians who diagnose and treat metastatic liver disease across the United States.