Eric J. Brown
Co-discoverer of mTOR: as first author he isolated the mammalian protein bound by the rapamycin-FKBP12 complex (FRAP) and cloned its gene in 1994.
Associate Professor of Cancer Biology, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania · PhD in Immunology, Harvard University (1996) · BA in Genetics, UC Berkeley (1989)
Portrait: Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
In the early 1990s rapamycin was known to stop cells from dividing, and it was known to work by first binding a small protein called FKBP12. Nobody knew what the drug-bound complex actually hit in mammalian cells. In the 1994 Nature paper in the Atlas, Eric Brown and colleagues in Stuart Schreiber's laboratory at Harvard used the rapamycin-FKBP12 complex to pull a large protein out of cell extracts, which they called FRAP.
They sequenced pieces of the purified protein and used them to find the human gene. It turned out to be closely related to the yeast TOR1 and TOR2 genes, which had already been linked to rapamycin. That match is why the protein is now called mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin. A paper from David Sabatini's laboratory, also in the Atlas, reached the same protein from rat brain in the same year.
Brown later moved his research away from mTOR. His lab at the University of Pennsylvania now studies how cells protect their DNA while it is being copied, with a focus on the ATR kinase and on ATR inhibitors as cancer treatments.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 1994 | M | A mammalian protein targeted by G1-arresting rapamycin-receptor complex BRO1994 First author: purified FRAP, the mammalian protein bound by the rapamycin-FKBP12 complex, and cloned the human gene, which resembles yeast TOR. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Eric J. Brown.
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- Stuart L. Schreiber Co-discovered mTOR in 1994 (his group called it FRAP) as the mammalian target of the FKBP12–rapamycin complex, and helped found chemical biology as a field
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