Patrick O. Brown

Administrative Appointments

• Board of Directors, Co-founder, Public Library of Science (2001 - present)
• Scientific Advisory Board, Canary Fund (2004 - present)
• Scientific Advisory Board, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (2000 - 2009)

Honors and Awards

• Member, Institute of Medicine (2009)
• Medal of Honor, American Cancer Society (2006)
• Curt Stern Award, American Society for Human Genetics (2005)
• Takeda Award, Takeda Foundation (2002)
• Member, National Academy of Sciences (2002)

Professional Education

Postdoctoral Advisees

Jamie Bates , Jason Casolari , Raymond Chen , Azzurra De Luca , Liana Lareau

Graduate & Fellowship Program Affiliations

• Biochemistry
• Cancer Biology
• Molecular and Genetic Medicine

Community & International Work

• Public Library of Science, San Francisco & Cambridge England 

Web Site Links

• Pat Brown's lab web site

Current Research Interests

Each cell in our bodies expresses a specific set of genes according to a precisely controlled genetic script that gives that cell its distinctive design and functional capabilities. The gene expression program that unfolds during a developmental or physiological or pathological process can be read as a kind of a script for that process.

Much of our research is directed at defining the gene expression scripts of the yeast and human genomes, understanding the logic and the molecular mechanisms that control them. These studies aim to provide a detailed picture of the rules and processes that govern expression of each gene. We are developing new genetic and biochemical approaches to systematically map out the regulatory circuitry that control that synthesis, processing, localization, translation and degradation of each gene’s transcripts. Our results thus far provide compelling evidence that post-transcriptional control plays a much richer and more important role in biological regulation than previously suspected.

We are characterizing the gene expression patterns in thousands of human cells and tissues under diverse conditions. These studies provide detailed molecular pictures of the programmed responses of the human genome to diverse physiological and pathological conditions, and clues to the mechanisms by which these processes are deranged in cancer and other diseases. We focus most of this effort in four areas:

1. Systematic investigation of the global program and molecular mechanisms of post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression in human development, physiology and disease.

2. Defining the cellular and molecular composition of human tissue and tumor microenvironments; understanding how they influence the survival, proliferation, differentiation and physiology of normal and cancer cells.

3. Identifying patterns of gene expression that can be used to detect and precisely identify human cancers and predict their...

Clinical Trials

• Microarray Analysis of Gene Expression in Prostate Tissues Recruiting
• Genetic & Pathological Studies of BRCA1/BRCA2: Associated Tumors & Blood Samples No longer recruiting

Publications

• Concordant regulation of translation and mRNA abundance for hundreds of targets of a human microRNA. Hendrickson DG, Hogan DJ, McCullough HL, Myers JW, Herschlag D, Ferrell JE, Brown PO. PLoS Biol. 2009; 7 (11): e1000238
• The preclinical natural history of serous ovarian cancer: defining the target for early detection. Brown PO, Palmer C. PLoS Med. 2009; 6 (7): e1000114
• The Stanford Tissue Microarray Database. Marinelli RJ, Montgomery K, Liu CL, Shah NH, Prapong W, Nitzberg M, Zachariah ZK, Sherlock GJ, Natkunam Y, West RB, van de Rijn M, Brown PO, Ball CA. Nucleic Acids Res. 2008; 36 (Database issue): D871-7
• Systematic identification of mRNAs recruited to argonaute 2 by specific microRNAs and corresponding changes in transcript abundance. Hendrickson DG, Hogan DJ, Herschlag D, Ferrell JE, Brown PO. PLoS One. 2008; 3 (5): e2126
• Systematic evaluation of candidate blood markers for detecting ovarian cancer. Palmer C, Duan X, Hawley S, Scholler N, Thorpe JD, Sahota RA, Wong MQ, Wray A, Bergan LA, Drescher CW, McIntosh MW, Brown PO, Nelson BH, Urban N. PLoS One. 2008; 3 (7): e2633