Robert L. Martuza

Robert Martuza is a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he runs the Molecular Neurosurgery Laboratory and works in the Brain Tumor Research Center. In 1991 he and colleagues reported dlsptk, a thymidine-kinase-negative mutant of herpes simplex virus type 1 attenuated for neurovirulence, which killed human glioma cells in culture, inhibited the growth of human gliomas implanted in nude mice, and prolonged survival when injected into intracranial gliomas.

Deleting the viral thymidine kinase makes the virus depend on the host cell's own nucleotide pool, which dividing tumour cells supply and resting brain cells do not. This is the first worked example of the move that defines the modern field: remove a viral gene whose job a cancer cell will do anyway. Every approved herpes-based product, including talimogene laherparepvec and the triple-mutated G47 delta approved in Japan, descends from this line of work, and his laboratory continues to build oncolytic herpes viruses carrying immune payloads.