James (Jim) R. Brown, M.Sc., PhD. Biography

Jim Brown is the founder and principal consultant of JRBrown Bio Consulting LLC (https://www.jrbrownbio.com/ ). Jim has extensive experience leading computational and multi-disciplinary drug discovery teams in the biopharma industry. His current consulting projects include coordinating multi-omics platforms and data analyses for human clinical drug trials in metabolic and cardiovascular health, sponsored by the biotech Cambrian Bio. He also has consulted on target discovery, AI and data science, infectious disease, multi-omics analyses and other biopharma topics on behalf of the consulting firms GLG, Alphasights and Arbolus.

Jim received a B.Sc. in Marine Biology from McGill University then, for a few years, worked as an Aquatic Field Technician and diver for Environment Canada in the Great Lakes and Northern Canada. Subsequently, he earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Simon Fraser University where his thesis’ topics involved oyster aquaculture site selection and molecular population genetics of sturgeon, respectively. Jim received a Medical Research Council of Canada post-doctoral fellowship to study the phylogenomics of early cellular evolution and the prokaryote to eukaryote transition, in the lab of Dr. W. Ford Doolittle, Dalhousie University.

In 1996, Jim joined the Computational Biology group of the global pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) where he spent 25 years before his voluntary retirement in 2021, holding the positions of Scientific Director and Senior Fellow. While at GSK, he coordinated computational biology and data science efforts across multiple drug discovery programs spanning the entire drug development pipeline from early target discovery and validation through to all phases of clinical trials and launched products.

He has extensive experience in developing strategic drug discovery solutions using advanced data analytics to multidimensional datasets including human genetics, next generation sequencing (NGS – transcriptomics, single-cell genomics, whole genome sequencing [WGS]), microbial WGS, microbiome metagenomics, molecular evolution and host-pathogen interactions. Also, he brings to projects an in-depth biological knowledge of diverse therapy areas including viral, bacterial and parasite infections, oncology and metabolic, respiratory, neuro-degenerative and autoimmune diseases.

While at GSK, Jim was sought-out for project work across all the three main business areas, pharma, vaccines and consumer health. Jim also spent a year-long secondment with a Business Development Team, providing genomics-oriented analysis in support of due diligences teams reviewing new biotech partnerships in oncology and other therapeutic areas. In this role, he innovated in the integration of genomics and target analyses for business partnership decisions.

Upon retiring from GSK, Jim was hired as Executive Director and Head of Computational Biology and Integrated Data Science at Kaleido Biosciences, a clinical phase Flagship biotech company focused on modulating the microbiome for immune-inflammatory and infectious diseases and cancer using specific chemical entities. There he expanded this team and established a novel data analysis pipeline focused on the integrative analyses of microbiome genomics, and human metabolomics, immunoproteomics and transcriptomics data. In addition, he successfully championed a new therapeutic area for the company, targeting the gut-lung axis for COPD, which led to a strategic collaboration with the non-profit COPD Foundation.

Subsequent to the closure of Kaleido in 2022, he became Vice-President of Computational Sciences at Novasenta, an early-stage biotech focused on single cell genomics and cancer immune therapy targeting the tumor microenviroment. There he led a team of computational biologists, data scientists and software engineers developing novel analytical platforms (including AI) to data-mine an extensive scRNA-seq database of clinical tumor samples, until late 2022.

Jim an extensive public scientific profile with 118 publications spanning the areas of host-pathogen interactions, drug discovery, molecular evolution, oncology, infectious diseases, computational biology and the microbiome. He has served on multiple external advisory boards including NIH and NSF review panels. Since 2001, he has been a member of the External Advisory Committee for the NIH funded Puerto Rico IDeA Network Biomedical Research Excellence (PR-INBRE) which supports core labs and individual investigators across multiple academic institutions in Puerto Rico. He is a Visiting Scholar at Drexel University, College of Engineering (AI and multi-omics analysis) and Courtesy Professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, School of Medicine (systems medicine).

Professional On-line Profiles

 Full resume (PDF) can be viewed here.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-r-brown-computational-biology/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NuEw1YoAAAAJ&hl=en