Frank Menniti, Ph.D.

Frank Menniti, Ph.D.

Frank S. Menniti, Ph.D., is a neuropharmacologist with BioPharmaWorks, LLC and a Ryan Research Professor of Neuroscience and Adjunct Professor, Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Rhode Island. Prior to this, he served as Founder and Chief Science Officer of MindImmune Therapeutics, Inc., a drug discovery company focused on developing immune modulators to treat diseases of the mind and brain. Prior to MindImmune, He was the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Mnemosyne Pharmaceuticals, Inc. developing subunit-selective NMDA receptor modulators. Mnemosyne partnered a GluN2B New Approach Methodology (NAM) for depression with Novartis and Novartis fully acquired this asset as well a second Mnemosyne asset, an NMDA receptor PAM for schizophrenia, through the purchase of Cadent Therapeutics, which developed small-molecule therapies to modulate brain rhythms for treating movement and cognitive disorders. Before founding Mnemosyne, he served as a Research Fellow in the CNS Discovery group at Pfizer in Groton, where he played a key role in developing the scientific rationale for NMDA receptor GluN2B antagonists as therapeutics for stroke, neuropathic pain, Parkinson’s disease, and depression, as well as in the clinical development of the prototype GluN2B antagonist CP-101,606. He also contributed to the development of phosphodiesterase inhibitors for neuropsychiatric disorders. This includes the identification of PDE10A inhibitors for schizophrenia and Huntington’s disease, with the first PDE10A inhibitor to reach Phase II development, the first PDE9A inhibitor into Phase II testing for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and the first PDE5A inhibitor into Phase II testing to improve functional recovery after stroke. After receiving a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1987, served as Staff Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. James W. Putney at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, participating in research elucidating the fundamentals of intracellular calcium signaling.