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.
“The use of our proprietary microarrays to study differential gene expression will provide, what we hope will be, significant insights to defining and developing therapeutic targets with Dr. Brown's assistance", Donald McCarren, CEO of AlphaGene, said in a statement.
AlphaGene is a privately held genomics that focuses on differential gene expression in degenerative neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.