W. Roy Smythe

W. Roy Smythe, M. D., (born July 14, 1960 in Temple, Texas United States) is Professor with Tenure and Chairman of Surgery for the Scott & White Memorial Hospital and Health System and the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine. He also holds the Glen and Rita K. Roney Endowed Chair in Surgery. He is a surgeon and one of the first biomedical researchers to investigate the use of adenoviral based gene therapy for cancer.

Roy Smythe grew up in Belton, Texas where he was a National Merit Scholarship recipient and an all-state football and track athlete. He attended Baylor University on combined athletic and academic scholarships and lettered on the 1980 Southwest Conference champion football team coached by Grant Teaff.

Smythe attended the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, where he received the Helen Salyer Anderson Award as the Outstanding Graduating Medical Student for Academic Achievement, along with Outstanding Student in Surgery and Psychiatry awards.

Following medical school, Smythe completed a categorical General Surgery residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. While training there, he worked in the first laboratory in the country to use a common cold virus, the adenovirus, to transfer genes to treat cancer, and was the lead author on the first paper describing the use of adenoviral based gene therapy to treat cancer models in the laboratory (Cancer Research, April 1994 15;54(8):2055-9). This work became the basis for one of the world's first human gene therapy trials for cancer and the world's first for mesothelioma, a lung cancer related to asbestos exposure.

Smythe then completed a residency in Cardiothoracic surgery. While at the University of Pennsylvania, he won the Jonathan Rhoads Award for Research and the William Inouye Award for medical student teaching, along with several other teaching awards and the Philadelphia County Medical Society Award for Humaneness in Medicine.

He was a faculty member at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas before coming to Scott & White Memorial Hospital and Texas A&M University. There he won the Institutional Physician Scientist Award and achieved the award of tenure from the University of Texas System.

Dr. Smythe serves as a Medical Trustee on the Scott & White Health System Board of Trustees, chaired by Drayton McLane, Jr. He has two children, a daughter and a son.