About Todd Demmy MD

Over my career, I have demonstrated academic and clinical success in both cardiac surgery and general thoracic surgery and understand the demands of both disciplines.  While at the University of Missouri, my funded cardiac physiology laboratory, minimally invasive and cardiac transplant program and thoracic oncology program were sufficient to achieve promotion and tenure.  After moving to Buffalo, I served as Chair of Thoracic Surgery at Roswell Park for 13 years and helped create a stable, high-functioning program and became well known for many innovations in VATS surgery including the world largest series of thoracoscopic pneumonectomies and other complex minimally invasive operations like VATS chest wall resections. My invention of the curve tip surgical stapler had a major international impact on the practice of thoracic surgery. I performed the first minimally invasive esophagectomy in western New York and built a busy collaborative robot-assisted esophagectomy program with our surgical oncologists at Roswell.

After a brief leadership role in NJ, I returned to Roswell Park to establish a busy innovative benign esophageal program, initiate a microlobectomy program, and continue focused work on a regional lung chemotherapeutic program called Suffusion that is now attracting national and international attention of patients with pulmonary metastases. This work was presented at the 2025 AATS meeting and offers a more accessible option for metastasis suppression than perfusion-based therapies. Recently, I achieved a breakthrough response in a patient with unresectable colorectal metastases that had exhausted all other options.