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"Dr. Drug Discovery" Comes to Georgetown
August 11, 2006
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Milton Brown
Dr. Drug Discovery
To a man whose interests span from fly-fishing to gospel music--with some basketball thrown in--spending time on a laboratory stool studying the structure of biological bits may not seem spirited enough.
But, even sitting still, Milton Brown, M.D., Ph.D., has a talent for “seeing” human molecules in motion, for sensing weak spots in the organic architecture of disease that can be exploited as potential treatments. He looks for the tiny clog that can bring the biological apparatus of a disorder to a halt. His is the intuitive mind of a drug designer.
This aptitude was first observed by his mentor, Dr. William Setzer, at University of Alabama in Huntsville, a man Brown describes fondly as “a flowered-shirt wearing wild man and a great chemist.” Brown studied with Setzer in the 1980s after graduating from Oakwood College, and he helped inspire Brown to seek a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, which he then followed up with an M.D. degree at the University of Virginia (UVA), so that he would be more familiar with the diseases he had the aptitude to heal.
His efforts have paid off. At UVA, where he worked for seven years after medical school, Brown tested thousands of potential drug compounds, which led to 16 patents and patent applications and two spin-off biotech companies. He and the lab team he built, and the 38 young scientists he helped train, zeroed in on proteins vital to a disease process, then used a computer program to compare the three-dimensional structures of the proteins with small molecules that might interfere with these proteins. Promising molecules were then tested in the lab and in animals to see if they affected disease machinery as predicted.
“My goal is to fit a small molecule into the clefts and valleys of a protein,” Brown explains.
But none of these potential drugs have been tested yet in humans. So it is for that reason that Brown, as well as nine members of his UVA laboratory, came to Georgetown University Medical Center in June to collaborate on clinical trials. Brown was recruited by the directors of GUMC’s research sectors, Dr. Vassilios Papadopoulos and Dr. Anatoly Dritschilo, to hold positions in the Departments of Oncology and Neuroscience, and eventually to direct a drug discovery center at GUMC. His appointment is one of the first steps toward developing a multidisciplinary center that will focus on commercializing drugs, a venture designed to build upon the Medical Center’s strengths in neuroscience and cancer.
Brown says that the Medical Center’s successful clinical trials program was a major factor in his choice to join Georgetown, as was the chance to work with its basic science researchers. He intends to collaborate with them to find small molecule inhibitors for the disease-causing proteins they study, and will then partner with translational researchers who can help bring these small molecules to human trials. Brown’s comprehensive approach to drug discovery is designed to take a unique idea through drug design and into clinical trials.
“Because of my medical background, I have a common portal to other fields and that makes it a lot easier to integrate people into what I do,” Brown said. “I have a basic understanding of what they do and I can bridge the gap between chemistry and biology, basic science and translational research.”
As soon as he arrived, Brown, who says he prefers to be called Milt, began to work from his new office on campus with only a small table, a phone, a single chair, and a coat hanger for furniture. As he spoke with a reporter, two members of his team from UVA were racing in and out of the new laboratories, while others were still packing up their labs and their lives in Charlottesville.
The first diseases that Brown and his team, along with Georgetown collaborators, are looking to develop targeted therapies for are prostate cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, pain, and epilepsy.
“Georgetown is very fertile right now,” he said. “If you can plug inhibitors into the proteins that research programs at Georgetown are already studying, it’s like you have multiple shots on goal to really do something valuable for people…I want to carry these through to Phase I trials.”
By Allison Whitney and Renee Twombly (GUMC)
August 2006
Media contact:
Marianne Worley
202-444-4659
Patient Contact
202-342-2400 |
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