Professor Robert Brown BSc PhD

Professor Robert Brown is Chair in Translational Oncology in the Department of Surgery and Oncology within the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College, where he heads the Epigenetics Unit. His post is a joint appointment between Imperial College London and Institute of Cancer Research where he is Professor of Translational Oncology in the Section of Medicine. Robert is Principal Investigator of a Cancer Research UK research programme, Pharmacodynamics and Drug Resistance and is a joint Principle Investigator of the Ovarian Cancer Action Centre research programme.

Professor Brown’s work focuses on epigenetics and drug resistance research, with a particular focus on ovarian cancer. He examines how tumours acquire resistance to chemotherapy and approaches to improving treatment by overcoming drug resistance. He and his team have shown that aberrant DNA methylation and epigenetic silencing of genes in tumours can predict response to chemotherapy and patient survival. As part of his work, Robert is also facilitating development of compounds which can reverse epigenetic silencing and is using molecular biomarker assays to aid the clinical use of these compounds. Further, he is identifying cancer specific epigenetic changes and developing novel compounds which target these changes. Recently, he has initiated studies on identifying such targets in ovarian tumour stem cells.