Snowdon

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October 11 , 2007: Snowdon, Inc. Receives National Research Award to Prevent & Treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases. Snowdon, Inc., a drug discovery company recently funded by an investment from Foundation Venture Capital Group, LLC, was awarded a $130,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to support further development of the company's novel therapies for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

This Phase I grant qualifies Snowdon to apply for Phase II funding up to $1 million upon successful completion of the Phase I proof-of-concept project.

"This vote of confidence by the NIH serves as an endorsement of Snowdon's innovative approach to finding new treatments for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases," explained, William Welsh, PhD, founder.

When granting the award, the NIH review panel said, "If successful, Snowdon's approach would constitute a major breakthrough in treating the root cause, rather than just the symptoms, of these two and many other diseases."

Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and scores of other incurable diseases share a common trait: aggregation of proteins into insoluble clumps known as amyloid fibrils.

"The amyloid fibrils themselves, or the process of protein aggregation, is responsible for the devastating effects of these diseases," Dr. Welsh explained. "Snowdon's molecules will, for the first time, stop or slow down the formation of these amyloid fibrils. If successful for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the same therapeutic strategy should work for other amyloid diseases such as type II diabetes, 'mad cow' disease and numerous inherited diseases."

Snowdon has developed a computer tool called ProMisfold that identifies those regions in proteins most likely to start the aggregation process. Once pinpointed by ProMisfold, these "hot spots" in proteins can be prevented from triggering the aggregation that leads to disease by unique drugs that protect these hot spots, according to Dr. Welsh.

This marks the second grant awarded to Snowdon since its first investment of $500,000 from Foundation Venture Capital Group. It also received a two-year $500,000 Edison Innovation Award grant from the New Jersey Commission on Science & Technology (NJCST) as a match for the $500,000 Foundation Venture investment.

Foundation Venture Capital Group was formed in 2006 to invest exclusively in technology at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey.

July 9, 2007: Tiny Snowdon Bags $1 Million in Just Eight Months
The startup uses UMDNJ technology to develop a novel method for discovering drugs
NJBIZ Staff, Thomas Gaudio

PISCATAWAY - A tiny Piscataway company with powerful drug-discovery tools and 13 early-stage products in its pipeline has won a $500,000 vote of confidence from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology. Investments in the eight-month-old firm, which now total $1 million, illustrate the growth of funding opportunities for technology startups in the state.

Snowdon Inc., using software technology created at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), is developing compounds to treat cancer, infectious disease and acute and chronic pain. The disease areas are the specialties of the company’s founder and CEO, William Welsh, a professor in the pharmacology department of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at UMDNJ.

Welsh says the commission grant will be used to test molecules that may play a role in treating and preventing parasitic infections that cause blindness in babies and kill AIDS patients. He says the firm has eight employees and is spending about $200,000 every two or three months—a burn rate that means its $1 million piggy bank could last about two
years.

“The reader might wonder how a small company can afford to [develop 13 compounds] with essentially modest resources,” he says. “The secret, really, is our discovery engine, which is a collection of computational tools that is anchored by software co-developed in our laboratory called Shape Signatures. It accelerates and streamlines the discovery of new drug leads.

“The competitive advantage that Snowdon has is using [the company’s proprietary computational tools] to do a lot of the prefiltering, prescreening and preselecting up front,” Welsh says, “and not do exhaustive testing in test tubes and animals.”

The software “not only identifies potential drug candidates, but also predicts their toxicity before they’re tested in animals,” Welsh says. Four of the company’s 13 drug candidates have made it into animal tests so far.

Snowdon rummages through what Welsh calls “vast databases of commercially available, simple organic molecules” and picks out compounds that it hopes will one day be the basis for therapies. Welsh says the company pays $25 or $50 for tiny amounts of a given molecule and then copies it for testing.

“We only buy the ones that we think are going to have the best chance of making it through,” he says. “We’re saving tremendous amounts of time and money doing that.”

The firm’s tech commission grant came last month through the Edison Innovation R&D Fund, which gives money to companies that partner with New Jersey-based organizations for early-stage development activities like proving a concept’s viability. Partners must match at least 20 percent of the commission award. In the case of universities, the
match can be in cash or in such things as equipment or services.

Snowdon was eligible for the grant because of a $500,000 investment last March from the Foundation Venture Capital Group LLC of New Brunswick, which was formed last year to invest in technologies developed at UMDNJ. The Snowdon investment marked the group’s first deal.

James Golubieski, president of the Foundation Venture Capital Group, says it works with UMDNJ’s technology-transfer department to identify and develop ideas and startup companies with the greatest potential for commercialization. He says the venture group is currently conducting due diligence on six ideas or companies out of hundreds of possible
recipients, and is negotiating terms with two or three of them. He says the group looks for returns such as royalties on sales or equity in promising companies that could partner with drugmakers or medical-device manufacturers. This article as it appears in NJ BIZ

June 23, 2007: Snowdon, Inc., announced today that it received a two-year $500,000 Edison Innovation Award grant from the New Jersey Commission on Science & Technology (NJCST).

The NJCST selected Snowdon's proposal for the grant award among a highly competitive field of applicant companies in New Jersey. “We are delighted to receive this prestigious award from the NJCST, especially in view of the highly competitive nature of the Edison Innovation Awards,” said Snowdon's founder Dr. Welsh. “This grant, together with funds from our investment partners, will propel the further development of Snowdon’s existing drug candidates for cancer, pain, and infectious diseases. From a broader perspective, these investments validate Snowdon’s drug development programs and our proprietary computational platform technology that streamlines and accelerates the discovery of safer and better pharmaceuticals.”

Funds from the NJCST grant will be used to test and develop an extraordinary new family of molecules discovered by Snowdon scientists to treat, and even prevent, devastating infectious parasitic diseases that cause deadly infections among HIV/AIDS patients and other immuno-compromised individuals. These parasites can also infect pregnant women and are the leading cause of congenital blindness and brain defects. They can persist for months in food and water, also making them a global threat to homeland security. Vaccines are non-existent, and adequate drug treatment is lacking due to acquired drug resistance by these parasites and severe adverse reactions by patients to existing treatments. In contrast, Snowdon's therapeutic candidates specifically kill these parasites but have shown no harmful effects in animal studies.

March 22, 2007: Snowdon, Inc. secured $500,000 in venture capital funding from the Foundation Venture Capital Group LLC (FVCG). It is the venture firm's first investment. According to Snowdon's founder and CEO Dr. William Welsh, the funds will be used to expand its business operations and to pursue preclinical and clinical development of its treatments for cancer, pain and infectious diseases