News

SIR and SIR Foundation send our condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Thierry de Baère, MD, a pioneer of interventional oncology and an SIR 2026 Gold Medalist. Dr. de Baère passed away on Dec. 16. We were looking forward to presenting him with the Gold Medal in Toronto in April 2026. We will now honor him posthumously at SIR 2026 in celebration of his life’s work.

“We are forever grateful to Thierry for his endless insights and innovations in the field of interventional oncology,” said SIR President Robert A. Lookstein, MD, FSIR. “We owe him a debt of gratitude for his dedication to bettering the lives of cancer patients through minimally invasive care.”

Professor Thierry Jacques de Baère, MD, was born in Paris in 1962. He studied at the University of Paris-Sud and did his residency at the Université de Caen Basse in Normandy. He was the head of the interventional radiology unit at Institut Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in Villejuif, France, where he worked since 1991. His clinical work was dedicated to minimal invasive therapy for treatment of liver, lung and kidney tumors, including intra-arterial therapies for primary and secondary liver tumors, and percutaneous ablation of liver tumors and lung tumors. He pioneered and investigated preoperative portal vein embolization to hypertrophy un-embolized parts of the liver. He was also actively studying robotic assistance for interventional oncology. He is the author of over 450 peer-reviewed articles, resulting in over 35,000 citations, and he co-authored guidelines on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and colorectal liver metastases.