LifePharms, Inc

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Fruiting bodies are collected, identified and catalogued. They are frozen as soon as possible after collection and kept frozen until extracted. The identifying and collecting are done by mycologists who are experts in identifying fungi from the region of the country where they were collected. LifePharms, Inc. has worked with many mycologists throughout North America . Because of the detailed information that we have on each sample, all of the species can be resupplied from their original region in a collecting season given normal weather conditions. Fruiting bodies are assigned to species or to a species group. The application of the biological species concept to fungi is complicated by the difficulties in mating and in assessing its outcome. As a result, field mycologists depend on morphological characteristics and differences among them. Some mycologists consider individuals with certain field characteristics as the same species even though there are minor differences among them. Other mycologists believe the minor differences define separate species. Each approach has it proponents, but has lead to the concept of species groups.

Lifepharms, Inc. is a biotechnology company headquartered at the University of Connecticut ’s Technology Incubation Program at Avery Point in Groton . LifePharms’ research focuses on discovering novel natural product compounds from basidiomycetes and ascomycetes (mushrooms). Its collection consists of more than 16,000 samples of these fungi that have been collected from sites over the entire North American continent.

Dr. Mena founded LifePharms, Inc. in 1995 after 10 years of at Pfizer Inc. While at Pfizer, he held various positions in Neuroscience Drug Discovery and High Throughput Screening. In 1987 he initiated a collaborative research effort between Pfizer and Natural Product Sciences, Inc. (now NPS Pharmaceuticals) to discover lead compounds from spider venoms for CNS therapeutic areas. Since 2000, Dr. Mena has been a faculty member of the University of Connecticut. He has had extensive experience in the development and implementation of high throughput screens for several therapeutic targets. From 1994 to 1998, he was a member of the Agriculture Biotechnology Advisory Board of the State of Connecticut and from 1998 to 2000 served a member of the Southeast Connecticut Biotechnology Development Committee. Dr. Mena was also Senior Biotechnology Consultant at The Washington Institute, McLean , Virginia , from 1996 to 2001. He was a member of a multidisciplinary team that included personnel from Sandia National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. The goal was to evaluate Cities’ responses to chemical and biological attacks.

Dr. Volkmann has had 35 years experience as a medicinal chemist at Pfizer Inc. He has had broad experience in all phases of drug discovery, including the synthesis and structure elucidation of NPs. He is an inventor/co-inventor on over 25 patents in several therapeutic areas While at Pfizer he was involved in all phased of drug discovery. In addition, he has designed and carried out total syntheses of several natural products/drug discovery targets over the course of four decades. These efforts have resulted in the progression of a number of candidates through the drug discovery pipeline. He was Chair of the Organic Division of the American Chemical Society in 2008. He is also CEO of SystaMedic.

LifePharms received a NIAID SBIR Phase I grant to develop therapeutics for M. turberculosis. LifePharms intends to use its large novel fungal library with state-of-the-art tuberculosis screening. The screening will be done at the University of Illinois at Chicago by Dr.

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