Learn more about the Teleport Team!

Teleport Pharmaceuticals

Drugs for the Brain from the Brain

Corporate Profiles

Mahendra Menakuru

CEO

For over three decades Mr. Menakuru has served in executive management of commercial organizations in the R&D and manufacture of various types of peptides and building blocks associated with peptide synthesis. He has worked in the design and commercialization of Peptide and Organic Synthesizers used by academic and pharmaceutical researchers. His background in engineering and finance complements the academic backgrounds of the founders of Teleport Pharmaceuticals with business acumen and agility.  For over three decades Mr. Menakuru has served in executive management of commercial organizations in the R&D and manufacture of various types of peptides and building blocks associated with peptide synthesis. He has worked in the design and commercialization of Peptide and Organic Synthesizers used by academic and pharmaceutical researchers. His background in engineering and finance complements the academic backgrounds of the founders of Teleport Pharmaceuticals with business acumen and agility.

[email protected]

FOUNDERS

Robin Polt

Professor Robin Polt has been doing groundbreaking research since his undergraduate days in Dr. Martin O’Donnell’s lab at IUPUI, while doing his undergraduate work thanks to the GI Bill. There, he produced the first of the “O’Donnell Schiff bases” now standard undergraduate Organic Chemistry textbook methodology for producing unusual and unnatural amino acids. He was awarded an NSF Pre-Doctoral fellowship while at IUPUI and went on to earn his Ph.D. at Columbia University with Professor Gilbert J. Stork, one of the developers of the first oral contraceptives.  He completed his training as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the lab of Prof. Dieter Seebach at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland before coming to the University of Arizona.
Dr. Polt has continued to develop novel synthetic methods for synthesis of amino acids, amino alcohols, glycosides and glycopeptides.  Through these methods he has produced  a number of pharmacologically active glycopeptides, alkaloid-like inhibitors of glycolipid processing enzymes and glycosyltransferases, as well as glycolipids with biological activity such as glycosphingolipids and rhamnolipids.  He discovered a new class of glycosphingolipids in the insect Manduca sexta — biologically active sphingomyelins and glycosides derived from dienylsphingosine, and he has developed methods for their synthesis, as well as the synthesis of rhamnolipids from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This research has served as the training ground of 20 Ph.D. students now well-established professionals in academia, industry, and government. as well as having ecent undergraduates have continued on to top-tier university programs.
His leading-edge work has been dedicated to carbohydrate chemistry  (glycolipids & glycopeptides) at cell membranes, membrane trafficking, and using these insights to design glycopeptide drugs from endogenous peptide neurotransmitters (neuromodulators, hormones) with enhanced stability in vivo that are capable of penetrating the Blood-Brain Barrier.
Polt and partners have formed Teleport Pharmaceuticals in order to exploit this chemistry to produce centrally active drugs based on peptide neurotransmitters.  Several companies have been founded based on glycopeptide IP discovered in Polt’s lab.  Such parallel development shows the promise of Polt’s innovative technologies and materials in novel drug development.  

[email protected]

Michael Heien

Dr. Michael Heien is co-founding partner at Teleport Pharmaceuticals, and an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arizona with his research informing the analytic chemistry of neurotransmitters.  

[email protected]

Torsten Falk

Dr. Torsten Falk is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Pharmacology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.  He has a background in Molecular Neurobiology, receiving his PhD at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and in Neurophysiology.  Since 2003 Dr. Falk’s research focuses on cellular and rodent models to test novel therapies for Parkinson’s disease (PD) treatment in three areas:  1) Novel pharmacological treatments for L-DOPA-induced dyskinesias (LID), a major side effect of PD treatment.  2) Testing novel neuroprotective (growth factor mediated) gene therapy approaches for PD.  3) Development of blood-brain barrier penetrant glycopeptide drug candidates for the treatment of PD.  He is the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal publications, with an h factor of 17, and over 130 peer-reviewed abstracts and conference presentations.  Dr. Falk holds two patents, and he has advanced one pharmacological treatment for LID to currently ongoing clinical trials.  He is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.  Dr. Falk is on the Grant Review Committee of the Parkinson’s Foundation.  He has also reviewed for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the Parkinson’s UK Foundation, the American Parkinson’s Disease Association, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.  

[email protected]

http://neurology.arizona.edu/torsten-falk-phd