From my days working in Glaxo Group Research, I have been interested in how G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) function to transfer extracellular signals to intracellular responses. As a pharmacologist, the cell signalling activity of GPCRs presents many possible sites for manipulation to provide new and improved drugs. I left Glaxo at the dawn of molecular biology, when researchers were at last able to isolate genes for a protein of interest and express them in a cell of their choice. It took me many years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) before I was able to initiate my own molecular pharmacology research projects; starting off with studying the prostacyclin (IP) receptor. Although IP receptors had been known for a long time to be important in preventing platelet aggregation (anti-thrombotic action), it wasn't until the 1990's when Prof. Shuh Narumiya's group in Kyoto University cloned all the prostanoid receptors that they discovered a distinct role for IP receptors in pain transmission.
My current research activites all stem from this starting point and for many years I attempted to keep two lines of work active: one on molecular pharmacology of GPCRs and the other on the activity of IP receptors in dorsal root ganglion cells. In this section of my website, I will deal with some of the molecular pharmacology work.