UB researcher receives inaugural ASPET Early Career Award

Jun-Xu Li, associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB, is being recognized by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) with the inaugural JH Woods Early Career Award in Behavioral Pharmacology.

The award recognizes outstanding behavioral pharmacology research by early-career investigators who must have received their doctorate in the past 15 years.

According to ASPET, Li was honored “for his strong, consistent, innovative approaches to identifying therapeutics to treat pain which are devoid of abuse liability.” His research focuses on discovering non-addictive painkillers and treatments for drug addiction.

“As chronic pain is a huge medical and economic challenge to  society, and opioid overdoses and deaths have reached epidemic levels nationwide, the discovery and development of non-addictive pain killers is critically important and an urgent need for millions of pain patients,” Li said.

He and his colleagues work with chemists to develop non-addictive painkillers with new mechanisms of action. They are studying specific receptors in the body’s nervous system that are promising drug targets, such as imidazoline I2 receptors, that may produce analgesic effects without the side effects of opioids. Li also is studying trace amine-associated receptor 1 (TAAR1), a relatively new receptor that shows promise as a target for treating drug addiction.

A UB faculty member since 2010, Li was a postdoctoral fellow and an instructor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

Other honors he has received are the Joseph Cochin Young Investigator Award from The College on Problems of Drug Dependence, the UB Exceptional Scholar: Young Investigator Award and the Maharaj Ticku Memorial Travel Fellowship from the UT Health Science Center

Li will receive the award at the ASPET Division for Behavioral Pharmacology’s annual meeting held in April at Experimental Biology 2019 in Orlando.