SPOTLIGHT ON
Fungus
Bondarzewia berkeleyi
Bondarzewia berkeleyi is a polypore and has a leathery outside with pores on its undersurface. This mushroom can grow to a quite large size, over 3 feet in diameter. It is also not unusual to find clusters gathered around the base of an oak tree from June to November. It is uncommon but fruits at the same location year after year. Most individual collections provide sufficient material for chemical structure identification.
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ABOUT
LifePharms Incorporated
Introducing LifePharms:
E. Edward Mena, Ph.D
President and Chief Scientific Officer
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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. His principle role was to critically examine the function and capabilities of the current and proposed biological detectors. |
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Education: Ph.D., Washington University , St. Louis , MO (Biochemistry)
BS, St. Louis University , St. Louis , MO (Chemistry)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Psychobiology, University of California , Irvine , CA |
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Robert A. Volkmann, Ph.D.
Director of Chemistry
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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. |
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Education: Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh (Organic Chemistry)
B.A. Lafayette College (Chemistry)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Stanford University |
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LifePharms employs 12 individuals in our extraction, biology, cell culture, and chemistry laboratories.
LifePharms has the ability to perform isolation of bioactive compounds and structure elucidation in a very time efficient manner. |
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