During the Opening Session of the 2014 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition, AAPS President Marilyn E. Morris, Ph.D. presented the ground-breaking researchers with awards commemorating their contributions to the pharmaceutical sciences. Among the awardees was PittPharmacy faculty member Xiang-Qun (Sean) Xie, PhD, MBA for Research Achievement Award in Drug Discovery and Development Interface — Sponsored by Allergan.
Xie is known for his pioneering research into developing diseases-specific chemogenomics databases and cloud computing drug target identification platform for “Big Data to Knowledge” translational research. His work includes Alzheimer’s, multiple myeloma, osteoporosis, and colon cancer knowledge bases as well as hematopoietic stem cell and cannabinoid molecular information databases, accessible worldwide. Xie and his collaborators have identified new drug targets and novel chemical agents with invention patents of the first p62ZZ chemical inhibitor for multiple myeloma, novel cannabinoid ligands for osteoporosis and APE1 inhibitor for tumor intervention. Xie is also Director of NIDA Center of Excellence for Computational Drug Abuse Research, a joint initiative between University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University to centralize state-of-the-art computational technologies and big data knowledgebase to advance neurological systems pharmacology and precision medicine research for preventing and treating drug abuse and addiction.
Xie is the associate dean for research innovation and professor in the pharmaceutical sciences department at PittPharmacy.
