Gertrude Elion

Gertrude Elion was a Nobel Prize-winning pharmacologist who co-developed 6-mercaptopurine with George Hitchings, transforming childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia from a virtually universally fatal disease to one where most children can be cured when combined with other agents. Without formal doctoral credentials, she produced a body of drug discovery work that resulted in multiple clinical approvals including thioguanine and acyclovir. Her recognition that cancer cells and pathogens have exploitable metabolic differences from normal cells founded the paradigm of rational targeted drug design that all modern oncology drugs descend from.