Surgery CancerCARE News Archive Featured in the Media JeffNEWS

Pancreatic cancer researcher Jonathan Robert Brody, Ph.D., has joined the Department of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University as assistant professor of surgery.

Prior to joining Jefferson, Dr. Brody served as an instructor at the Johns Hopkins University in advanced programs in biotechnology.

Currently, Dr. Brody is attempting to utilize the genetic understanding of pancreatic cancer to provide more rationale drug treatments. The studies include optimizing the common chemotherapeutic 5-fluorouracial and other drugs that can take advantage of mutations found in the majority of pancreatic cancers. The main goal of Dr. Brody’s laboratory is to understand the basic properties and defects of pancreatic cancer so he can translate this understanding to optimize the use of chemotherapeutics.

“It is our hope that, in the near future, his research will provide critical information to clinicians about how to rationally treat pancreatic cancer patients based on the individual characteristics of each patient’s tumor,” said Charles J. Yeo, M.D., Samuel D. Gross professor and chair of surgery at Jefferson.

While at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Brody took a postdoctoral position in oncology, training under the mentorship of Scott Kern, M.D., a world expert in the genetics of pancreatic cancer. With Dr. Kern, Dr. Brody revolutionized a basic molecular biology technique, DNA electrophoresis. Dr. Brody developed a low-molarity conductive media that is now being used worldwide to help speed the process time behind genetic based studies. Some predict this could speed up genetic research over five-fold. He also was Chief Graduate Student for the Department of Pathology at Johns Hopkins University in 2002.

In 2003, Dr. Brody received the Excellence in Basic Science Research honor from the Pathology Department for the fourth and fifth Annual Young Investigator’s Day and the Experimental-Pathologist-Trainee of the Year from the American Investigative Society for Pathology. Dr. Brody is the author of nearly two dozen peer-reviewed publications.

Dr. Brody earned a bachelor of arts degree in history from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in 1992 where he was a prestigious Filene Music Scholar for four years and a doctor of philosophy degree in pathobiology from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2002. His thesis included cloning and defining a gene family linked to the process of prostatic and breast tumorigenesis.