Brown named Syapse chief medical officer

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email
Share on print

Thomas D. Brown was named chief medical officer at Syapse.

Brown joins Syapse from the Swedish Cancer Institute at Providence St. Joseph Health, where he served as executive director of SCI and led the establishment of the SCI Personalized Medicine Program. Brown also served in leadership roles across PSJH, including co-chair of the PSJH Cancer Leadership Council and co-chair of the PSJH Genomics Initiative.

Brown’s clinical and research efforts have been focused on gastrointestinal malignancies, broad developmental therapeutics in oncology, specifically phase I and II clinical trials, and health care policy and global medicine.

Prior to SCI, Brown served as professor of medicine and chief operating officer at the University of Arizona Cancer Center. He also spent a decade at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he was a professor of medicine, and served as both deputy head and head ad interim of the Division of Cancer Medicine, as well as vice president for international programs.

While on the faculty at Duke University, Brown was one of the founding members of the multi-disciplinary GI cancer program, and of a southeast regional clinical trials consortium. Brown began his career as a faculty member at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, working as a member of its phase I program, and serving as an executive officer within the Southwest Oncology Group where he was responsible for coordination of SWOG’s phase II portfolio.

Table of Contents

YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN

For nearly 25 years, business executive Lou Weisbach and urologist Richard J. Boxer have argued that finding the money to finance the cures for devastating diseases is not as difficult as it appears. To start finding the cures, the U.S. Department of the Treasury needs to issue some bonds—$750 billion worth. Next, you hire CEOs—one...

There is general agreement that the United States spends too much on health care, especially on pharmaceuticals.  But what we spend on drugs is not simply a function of price. If eggs double in price, people can simply cut the number of eggs they eat in half.  Simply stated, cost is the product of (price per unit times the number of units purchased). 
What did President Richard M. Nixon and Senator Edward M. Kennedy have in common? They each played a pivotal role in the passage of the National Cancer Act signed by Nixon on Dec. 23, 1971. The NCA established the National Cancer Program authorizing the initial investment in the NCI-designated Cancer Centers Program. 
When I first proposed targeting PCNA (proliferating cell nuclear antigen) as a therapeutic approach, the response I got was: “No one will ever make a drug against PCNA. It’s undruggable.” The protein lacks enzymatic activity, has a disordered region, and binds to over 200 other proteins within the cell. From a traditional drug development perspective, these characteristics made PCNA an impossible target.

Never miss an issue!

Get alerts for our award-winning coverage in your inbox.

Login