Yeon Sun Lee, PhD

Dr. Lee is the Principal Scientist at Calviri INC, Phoenix. They retired from the College of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology at the University of Arizona. Dr. Lee has been focusing on creating new molecules for neurological diseases and chronic neuropathic pain, identifying key structural features for target receptors, and developing a new class of ligands to reduce serious side effects caused by long-term administration of opioids for chronic pain states while retaining their high efficacies. This represents a new approach: drug design for pathological conditions. Drug design based on normal pain states is inadequate due to adaptation and neuroplasticity. Their design, a bifunctional ligand, demonstrated efficacy for the treatment of chronic pain states and could counter the underlying changes that occur in the nervous system. Developing multifunctional ligands and systems-based drug design offered a critical new approach to efficacy for chronic pain states. This approach is in need and rapidly expanding to other research areas to treat diverse central nervous system diseases.