On January 17th, 2008, Dr. Milton Brown, P99, was installed as the inaugural Richard Von Matsch Endowed Chair in Experimental Therapeutics at Georgetown University Medical Center.   The Richard Von Matsch Endowed Chair is part of a larger, $4.5 million gift from Elisabeth Richard von Matsch and her father, Edwin H. Richard.  The gift is designed to help narrow “the gap between the discovery of tools that improve our knowledge of diseases and the number of new therapies ‘translated’ to the bedside” by promoting clinical and translational drug discovery research at GUMC.  As chair, Dr. Brown will continue to lead Georgetown's Drug Discovery Program which supports more than 20 investigators.

Leading up to his inauguration as the Richard Von Matsch chair, Dr. Brown has established an impressive career in drug development and medicinal chemistry.  He holds a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (1995) and an MD from the University of Virginia (1999).  After completing his MD, Dr. Brown accepted a postdoctoral position at UVA where he was hired as an assistant professor one year later.  By 2003, Dr. Brown was tenured and had been promoted to associate professor of chemistry at UVA. He transitioned to a dual associate professor appointment at Georgetown in 2006 in the Oncology and Neuroscience departments before becoming the first Richard Von Matsch Chair. 

Throughout his career, Dr. Brown has developed novel drugs to address many diseases including cancer, hypertension, and epilepsy.   He holds a patent for a new class of oral general anesthetics and has over 20 pending patents pending for other drugs he's designed.  Furthermore, over 1,000 of his compounds are being studied at NINDS, NCI, and other cancer centers throughout the U.S.

Further Reading:

Reider, Frank.  “Milton Brown and Drug Discovery: GUMC’s Bold New Move in Therapeutic Research.”   Georgetown Medicine Magazine, Spring 2007:pp 24 – 32.