René Adam

René Adam, MD, PhD is Professor of Surgery and Head of the Hepatobiliary Centre at Hôpital Paul-Brousse, Université Paris-Saclay — one of the world's highest-volume liver surgery programs and a global reference center for hepatic oncology. He is one of the most cited hepatobiliary surgeons internationally, best known for pioneering the concept of downsizing chemotherapy to convert initially unresectable colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) to resectability, a strategy that has extended curative-intent surgery to thousands of patients previously deemed incurable. Dr. Adam's center contributed seminal data to the EORTC 40983 trial (the CLOCC trial), which established that perioperative FOLFOX chemotherapy combined with liver resection significantly improved 3-year progression-free survival compared with surgery alone in resectable CRLM. His parallel work on "rescue" liver resection after chemotherapy response transformed surgical decision-making globally. He developed the Adam criteria for resectability and created the LiverMetSurvey international registry — a prospective database of over 40,000 patients with CRLM across more than 250 centers worldwide — which continues to generate landmark prognostic and practice-changing evidence. Beyond CRLM, Dr. Adam has contributed extensively to hepatectomy for HCC in cirrhotic patients, liver-first strategies for synchronous CRLM, and associating liver partition and portal vein ligation for staged hepatectomy (ALPPS). He has received the highest honors from the European and world hepatobiliary surgical societies and has trained liver surgeons across five continents.