Jun Xu

Biography

Jun Xu, PhD, Professor in Medicinal Chemistry & CADD, director of Research Center for Drug Discovery (RCDD), Principal Investigator of School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Sun Yat-Sen University. He received PhD degree in Chemistry from University of Science & Technology of China in 1989. He finished his post-doc training in Protein NMR from Australian National University and McGill University in Montreal. Until recently, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry, practicing chemoinformatics and computer-aided drug design (CADD) for over 20 years. Most recently, he was director of CADD at DPI/Biofocus, a drug discovery CRO. Prior to joining DPI, he was a principal scientist managing the computational chemistry and chemoinformatics group at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (BIPI). Before joining BIPI, he held an R&D director position at BIO-RAD Sadtler Division, and was a senior staff scientist developing drug discovery related technology at both OMG (now merged with Accelrys) and Tripos. In 2009, he became Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and CADD, and the Director and Founding Professor of the Research Center for Drug Discovery (RCDD) and the HPC Center for Life Sciences (HPCCLS) at Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU) in Guangzhou, China. His main focus at SYSU has been to apply the principles of chemoinformatics to the design of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) remedies. To this end, he has developed TCM databases, including a database of compounds containing herbs used in TCM prescriptions, along with the corresponding disease states treated. His team has also built a repository of these compounds, which now stands more than 7,200 compounds and is growing at the rate of several hundred compounds/mo. His labs are equipped for natural product or traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) extraction, separation, purification, structure elucidation, biological screening, and crystallography. His team has recently derived a new combination of TCM herbs for the treatment of flu in response to a program launched by the Ministry of Health of China.

Research Interest

Chemoinformatics and Computer-aided Drug Design