Associate Professor

Email: Xuming.Zhang@warwick.ac.uk

Phone: 024 761 50755 ns in a new windowother social media handle

Zhang Group webpage

Research Clusters

Neuroscience

Vacancies and Opportunities

For PhD and postdoctoral opportunities, and interest in potential collaborations, please contact me at the above email address.

Research Interests

Acute pain warns us of danger allowing us to initiate protective behaviours and is thus beneficial. However, chronic and sustained pain is debilitating and harmful to health. It has become one of the most common medical conditions associated with many diseases such as arthritis, cancer and diabetes. We aim to understand how pain signals are generated and then transmitted to the brain, and how it is maintained for a long period with a view to devising novel therapies for a better treatment of chronic pain.

Research: Technical Summary

We are interested in the molecular and cellular mechanisms of somatosensory biology and pain. Acute pain arises from the activation of nociceptors and generation of action potentials. They are then transmitted to the central nervous system through afferent nerve fibres. However, this pain pathway is subjected to alteration and remoulding under disease conditions such as inflammation, nerve injury and chronic arthritis leading to chronic pain.

We investigate ion channels such as TRP channels and voltage-gated Na+ and K+ channels responsible for the generation and transmission of pain signals. We also examine the signalling molecules critical to remoulding of the pain pathway. Our ambitions are to identify the targets critical to chronic pain facilitating the development of efficacious analgesics.