Werner Hohenberger MD, PhD

Dr. Hohenberger, MD, Ph.D. studied medicine at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen from 1967 to 1973. His career began in 1975 as an assistant doctor and continued as a staff doctor during military service in Germany and as a scientific assistant at the surgical clinic at the University Hospital Erlangen and at the clinic for visceral surgery at the University of Bern. From 1995 until his retirement in 2015, Hohenberger was Director of the Surgical Clinic at the University Hospital in Erlangen.

With his clinical and scientific activities, Hohenberger has made a decisive contribution to advancing cancer medicine. He has received several scientific prizes and awards for this and for the development of so-called “multimodal therapies” in the treatment of colon cancer. According to cancer experts, this therapy includes a coordinated approach to treatment with surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, as well as close cooperation between the various medical disciplines. The aim of the procedure is to achieve the greatest possible effect against the tumor and to keep the side effects as low as possible.

In addition, in 2009 he described mesocolic excision with the aim of standardizing the surgical treatment of colon cancer (colon carcinoma) in a manner adapted to modern cancer surgery and introduced it into the literature, which is now internationally recognized as "Complete Mesocolic Excision - CME" as the leading surgical method.