NEW YORK, May 29 – AlphaGene said Tuesday it had appointed Robert Brown, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School, as a member of its scientific advisory board.

Brown will work with AlphaGene of Woburn, Mass., to find novel genes associated with a recessive form of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Brown, who is also director of the Day Neuromuscular Research Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, helped to define mutations in the gene encoding SOD1 as one cause of hereditary ALS.