03/02/2026
By Dongming Xie
Day: Thursday, March 5
Time: 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Location: Shah Hall 303
Abstract: Chronic pain remains a significant public health problem as it affects more than 100 million people in the United States and has an economic burden of more than $600 billion. Although many treatment options for pain management exist, they have limitations in the duration and intensity of pain relief, resulting in a largely unmet need for patients with chronic pain. Prescription opioids (hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine, etc.) are often the mainstay of treatment for moderate to severe pain. However, opioid treatment often leads to tolerance, addiction, diversion, and fatal overdose. My laboratory is dedicated to developing clinically translatable local anesthesia formulations as opioid alternatives to meet patient needs for chronic pain management and address the opioid crisis. To achieve this goal, our strategy is to explore new potent local anesthetics (tetrodotoxin) and improve the pain relief effect of clinically used non-opioid local anesthetics. In this talk, I will present several local anesthesia formulations based on tetrodotoxin and conventional local anesthetics (bupivacaine and capsaicin), which are superior to clinically used local anesthetics in terms of duration and intensity of pain relief and side effects. These formulations hold promise for adequately treating chronic pain and reducing the prescription of opioids.
Biography: Chao Zhao received his BS in Polymer Materials and Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China (2004), his MS in Chemical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China (2006), and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Akron, USA (2013). He was trained as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter X. Ma’s laboratory at the University of Michigan (2013-2016), Daniel Kohane’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School (2016-2018), and Robert Langer’s laboratory at MIT (2016-2018). Zhao started his independent research career in 2018 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Alabama. Zhao joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Department of Biomedical engineering at The University of Massachusetts Amherst as an Associate Professor as of August 2025.The Zhao laboratory is dedicated to developing opioid alternatives for pain treatment to help end the opioid endemic in the United States. His work has been funded by NIH/NIGMS, NIH/NINDS, and the U. S. Department of Education.