Christopher C. Thompson, MD, MSc, FASGE, FACG, AGAF, FJGES is the Director of Endoscopy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Advanced Endoscopy Fellowship Program Director and is clinical faculty at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Thompson’s clinical interests include endoscopic surgery as applied to foregut conditions, pancreaticobiliary disease, postsurgical complications, and bariatric endoscopy. He spends the majority of his time performing these advanced endoscopic procedures and also cares for patients in the ambulatory setting and on the gastroenterology inpatient consult service. The remainder of his time is devoted to research activities in endoscopic surgery, with a focus on device development, endoscopic education, and clinical outcomes. He currently has active clinical, translational, bench, and large animal protocols.
He has also led several multicenter clinical trials. His research has resulted in numerous patents, the development of new endoscopic procedures, and over 200 publications. Some of his important clinical innovations include the development of new endoscopic techniques for treating pancreatic necrosis, gastric outlet obstruction, sleeve gastrectomy stenosis, pancreatojejunal anastomotic strictures, and postsurgical complications. Additionally, he was awarded the Brigham and Women’s Physician Organization Clinical Innovation Award in 2007 for developing and performing the first endoscopic suturing procedure to treat obesity. He also invented anastomosis technology which has been shown to effectively treat type 2 diabetes in early clinical trials. He was responsible for much of the early work in Bariatric Endoscopy, helping to pioneer the field, and edited the first textbook on the subject. In addition to these clinical innovations, he developed an endoscopic part-task simulator that is used by many fellowship programs. He founded four medical device start-up companies including Beacon Endoscopic which was acquired by Covidien in 2013. He was a founding member of the original NOTES working group and founding chair for the Association of Bariatric Endoscopy (ABE).
These accomplishments have led to a broad clinical referral base, and to national and international invitations for lectureships and live case demonstrations, including the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Blackwell Lectureship, the American Gastroenterology Association (AGA) Presidential Plenary Lecture, the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) J Edward Berk Presidential Plenary Lecture, the ACG Edgar Achkar Visiting Professorship, various post-graduate education courses for major US gastroenterology and surgical societies, and numerous respected courses throughout Europe, Asia, and South America. In 2019 he was awarded the ASGE Distinguished Endoscopic Research Mentoring Award, which recognizes outstanding career achievement by endoscopic research mentors who have devoted substantial time and effort to develop and nurture the next generation of endoscopic investigators. He has mentored more than 20 fellows, many of whom have gone on to thrive in prestigious academic institutions, and established the first Fellowship in Bariatric Endoscopy.