Hiroshi Ueda, Professor Emeritus of Nagasaki University, is now a chair professor at the Department of Pharmacology, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei. He is also working at the Research Institute for Production Development, Seiken, Kyoto as an Academic Advisor and Principal Investigator. He received an MS degree in Pharmacology and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Kyoto University, in 1978 and 1981, respectively. He was recently awarded The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan Award (2019) and Gayle A. Olson & Richard D. Olson Prize 2020. He has been working on opioid and pain research since 1975. As such, he has contributed to the International Association of Study of Pain (IASP), as a council (2010–2016). He also served as the director of Japan’s national high-tech-equipped drug discovery center in Nagasaki (AMED). His major works include the discovery of kyotorphin (Nature, 1979), the reconstitution of purified opioid receptors with G-proteins (PNAS, 1988), the identification of LPA as the initiator of neuropathic pain (Nature Med., 2004) and the discovery of prothymosin alpha, a neuroprotective DAMPs/Alarmins (JCB, 2017).