The Xu lab addresses unmet healthcare needs through the development of an innovative, multidisciplinary, and accelerated drug discovery platform that synergizes state-of-the-art experimental and computational technologies.

Wet Lab Research: Interdisciplinary Drug Discovery and Repurposing for Hearing Loss Prevention and Treatment.

We have developed novel computational approaches that leverage big data (clinical, gene expression, pharmacological, and molecular data) for high-throughput drug screening and repurposing. Combined with unbiased animal models and clinical trials, our state-of-the-art methods significantly improves drug screening efficiency, preclinical-to-clinical translatability, and as a result the likelihood of successful drug development programs. Our drug discovery pipeline is creating novel therapeutics that will prevent or restore hearing loss that affects 15% Americans and 500 million people worldwide.

Dry Lab Research: Software Development of the ezCADD Web Drug Discovery Platform

State-of-the-art computational methods are being implemented into the ezCADD web drug discovery platform, designed to empower non-computational biomedical researchers around the world. ezCADD delivers a rapid, rich, smooth, dynamic, and desktop-like WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") modeling experience using a web browser with jobs completed within the human interactive time scale (seconds to minutes). Key features include web-based 2D/3D molecular visualization, structure-based and ligand-based drug design, molecular docking, high-throughput virtual screening, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, homology modeling, molecular dynamics, free energy calculations, machine learning, AWS cloud computing support, etc.