William E. Fisher MD, FACS

Dr. William E. Fisher is an internationally-known leader in pancreatic surgery. For over 20 years, his practice in Houston has been focused entirely on surgery for pancreatic tumors and cysts. Dr. Fisher has extensive experience in advanced minimally invasive robotic pancreas surgery. Dr. Fisher sees patients in the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center. Never satisfied with good but striving to provide literally the best surgical care in the world is how best to describe Dr. Fisher. As Professor of Surgery and Vice-Chair for Clinical Affairs in the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery, he participates in training the next generation of surgeons.

He demonstrates to our residents and medical students, on a daily basis, the very best of all aspects of surgical care from the application of new techniques to an excellent bedside manner. He is constantly applying the very latest in medical technology balanced by his experience and a common-sense approach. In short, he treats every patient exactly as he would expect a member of his immediate family to be treated. Dr. Fisher has been a member of Baylor faculty since 1998 and in that time he has built one of the largest clinical programs for the surgical treatment of pancreatic disease in Texas with outstanding outcomes. He is internationally known for his clinical work as a pancreatic surgeon, as well as his basic science and clinical research work in pancreatic cancer. As Director of the Elkins Pancreas Center at Baylor College of Medicine, he has helped develop and coordinates all of the clinical care for a large pancreatic cancer patient population as well as the basic science and clinical research related to pancreatic cancer being performed at Baylor.

Dr. Fisher’s clinical research program has been highlighted by his role as PI of two NIH-funded multicenter randomized clinical trials that generated a practice-changing impact on the use of drains during pancreatectomy and the subsequent development of a multicenter pancreatic surgery outcomes consortium. His basic science lab has studied the influence of gastrointestinal hormones on pancreatic cancer growth, the relationship between diabetes and pancreatic cancer, and genomic analysis of pancreatic cancer, resulting in over 160 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Fisher is currently PI at BCM for the NIH Consortium to Study Chronic Pancreatitis, Diabetes and Pancreatic Cancer. Dr. Fisher was also the driving force behind several large collaborative gene sequencing studies that lead to novel discoveries of the genetics of pancreatic cancer published in Nature. Dr. Fisher leads a team of research clinicians dedicated to translating discoveries from the bench to the bedside and has served as principal investigator on more than 15 clinical trials for patients with pancreatic cancer. Dr. Fisher has also significantly impacted numerous surgery residents who have gone on to make their own contributions to American surgery.