A research team led by Dr. Xiaoyu Li and collaborators develop a new drug discovery strategy for “undruggable” drug targets

A research team led by Dr. Xiaoyu LI from the Research Division for Chemistry, Faculty of Science, in collaboration with Professor Yizhou LI from School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chongqing University and Professor Yan CAO from School of Pharmacy, Second Military Medical University in Shanghai has developed a new drug discovery method targeting membrane proteins on live cells.

Membrane proteins play important roles in biology, and many of them are high-value targets that are being intensively pursued in the pharmaceutical industry. The method developed by Dr. Li’s team provides an efficient way to discover novel ligands and inhibitors against membrane proteins, which remain largely intractable to traditional approaches. The development of the methodology and its applications are now published in Nature Chemistry, a prestigious chemistry journal by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG).

Please find details in HKU press release, and news reports from media here.