Dong “Danny” Xu, PhD

Associate Professor, Pharmacy and Director, Pharmaceutical Science Graduate Programs

Research Interests

Discovery of novel drug candidates, new indications of FDA-approved drugs and drug combinations
Detection, prediction, and prevention of drug-induced toxicities
Development of web-based and data-driven biomedical software

NIH Bibliography

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/browse/collection/43814032/?sort=date&direction=descending

Sample Publications

Culbertson VL, Rahman SE, Bosen GC, Caylor ML, Xu D. Use of a Bioinformatics-Based Toxicity Scoring System to Assess Serotonin Burden and Predict Population-Level Adverse Drug Events from Concomitant Serotonergic Drug Therapy. Pharmacotherapy. 2019; 39(2):171-181.

Xu D, Smolin N, Shaw R, Battey S, Tao A, Huang Y, Rahman S, Caylor M. Molecular insights into the improved clinical performance of PEGylated interferon therapeutics: a molecular dynamics perspective RSC Advances. 2018; 8(5):2315-2322.

Xu D, Ham AG, Tivis RD, Caylor ML, Tao A, Flynn ST, Economen PJ, Dang HK, Johnson RW, Culbertson VL. MSBIS: A multi-step biomedical informatics screening approach for identifying medications that mitigate the risks of metoclopramide-induced tardive dyskinesia. EBioMedicine, 26, 132-137, 2017.

Bio

In addition to his role as Associate Professor (Tenured) and Graduate Programs Director for the College of Pharmacy, Dr. Xu is the Principal Investigator for the Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Dr. Xu's lab (http://dxulab.org) aims to enable biomedical discovery and address unmet medical needs using state-of-the-art computational and informatics technologies. Tangible contributions to the field, thus far, include:

Numerous new anti-cancer and anti-bacterial drugs were discovered
A novel method to predict and assess anticholinergic and serotonergic toxicities was developed
Our web services (TargetSearch and ezCADD) helped researcher gain molecular insights

Dr. Xu received his Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Chemistry from San Diego State University; he completed post-doctoral training with the University of California, San Diego in Computational Biochemistry. Dr. Xu also earned a Master of Science in Computation Chemistry from San Diego State University.