Dr. Xu's biomedical laboratory addresses unmet healthcare needs and accelerates drug discovery using state-of-the-art computational, informatics, and experimental technologies. Current research focuses on drug discovery for the prevention of drug-induced toxicities and software development of the ezCADD web drug discovery platform. Dr. Xu has developed new computational approaches that leverage big data (clinical, pharmacological, and molecular/structural data) in high-throughput drug screening and re-purposing. The use of clinical data in preclinical studies, combined with efficient vertebrate and mammalian animal models (zebrafish, mice, and rats) significantly improves preclinical to clinical translatability and the likelihood of successful drug discovery programs. These new methods are being applied to the search of novel therapeutics that will prevent or mitigate hearing loss, a public health issue affecting 15% Americans and 500 million people worldwide. These new methods are also being implemented into the ezCADD web drug discovery platform, designed to empower non-computational biomedical researchers around the world.