In addition to his research and academic responsibilities at GUMC, Dr. Milton Brown has established the Drug Discovery Program at the Georgetown University Medical Center, which supports more than 20 investigators in drug discovery and development.

On Thursday, January 17, 2008, Dr. Brown was recognized as the inaugural Edwin H. Richard and Elisabeth Richard von Matsch Endowed Chair in Experimental Therapeutics at Georgetown. As chair, Dr. Brown continues to lead Georgetown’s thriving Drug Discovery Program in its mission to develop lifesaving diagnostics and therapeutics.

Dr. Brown has more than 15 years of experience in developing new drugs in the fields of cancer and neuroscience, and his GUMC lab is uniquely positioned at the interface of chemistry and medicine to help facilitate the translation of basic science towards new medical therapies. He has designed and synthesized more than 1,000 targeted compounds for studies at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and other U.S. cancer centers. His laboratory is equipped to design and synthesize new compounds, evaluate the compounds against targeted proteins and human cancer cell lines, characterize the maximal tolerated dose (MTD) in small animals and to evaluate candidate compounds in mouse xenograft models.

In the area of drug discovery and development, Dr. Brown is a member of the Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) sponsored by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. This program is developing novel agents targeted a translocation products important in the acute myeloid leukemia with partners from Harvard, Dartmouth, and the University of Virginia.

Dr. Brown served as a member of both the Experimental Therapeutics and the Drug Discovery and Molecular Pharmacology study sections at NIH (2001-2006) and in the 2006 Breast Cancer Experimental Therapeutics study section at the Department of Defense (DOD). He serves as an elected member of the medicinal chemistry long-range planning committee for the American Chemical Society.

He earned his PhD in synthetic chemistry from University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1995, and his medical degree at the University of Virginia in 1999. Dr. Brown received postdoctoral training in the Department of Chemistry at UVA, and in 2000 became an assistant professor of chemistry in that department. In 2003, Dr. Brown was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. Also while at Virginia, Dr. Brown served as the founding director of preclinical studies at the UVA Cancer Center, charged with translating new anti-proliferative agents for the clinic.

Dr. Brown is a reviewer for the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry and the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Dr. Brown has given more than 50 invited lectures in the United States and in Europe on drug discovery and development topics. Dr. Brown is presently a consultant with several biotech companies and one major pharmaceutical company in the area of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. As a result of his work, several license agreements with a large pharmaceutical company have emerged for the evaluation and development of several of his compounds.