Abstract

Biography

Hanns Ulrich Zeilhofer is Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. He is an MD by training and holds a board certification in Clinical Pharmacology. He did his postdoctoral training at the University of Erlangen, the Max-Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry and at ETH Z ürich, before he joined UZH as professor of pharmacology. He has served as the director of the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the University of Zurich for 16 years and as a member of the research council of the Swiss National Science Foundation for 8 years. He is also a founding member of the Drug Discovery network Zurich (DDNZ). Currently, he serves as deputy dean of the Faculty of Medicine at UZH .

His research has been supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC), the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, among others. Current research projects concentrate on the cellular and molecular basis of nociceptive processing in the spinal dorsal horn. Central to his group’s research is the control of nociception by dorsal horn inhibitory neurotransmitters and inhibitory interneurons, which he and his team study on the molecular, cellular and circuit level.

Molecular aspects include strategies to restore proper synaptic inhibition in pathological pain states. These projects have led to the identification a2 GABAA and a3 glycine receptors as potential targets in chronic pain conditions. To address the diversity of inhibitory dorsal horn neurons and their integration into local circuits and long-range projections his team has established a highly versatile toolbox of transgenic mouse lines and viruses suitable for conditional ablation, silencing and activation of genetically defined dorsal horn interneuron populations.

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