Sheridan Snyder

Sheridan Gray Snyder OBE (born October 20, 1936) is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist in the biotechnology industry.

He is the founder and CEO of Biocatalyst, Genzyme and others.

Snyder graduated from The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and is a 1958 graduate of The University of Virginia with a Bachelor of Arts in French & Romance Languages.

At UVa, Snyder was a member of the SPE social fraternity.

Glassmeyer, a Princeton graduate, began in venture capitalism in 1968 to 1970 at CitiCorp Venture Capital.

By 1970 Snyder had sold Cambridge Machine Corporation to Pitney-Bowes and he began working for them as National Sales Account manager.

In 1971, Snyder founded a start-up packaging company, Instapak, funded by venture capitalist, Ed Glassmeyer.

Instapak markets "foam-in-place packaging"—revolutionary for its time— that creates a protective barrier for heavy, fragile instrumentation and computer systems.

Instapak is now the largest division of Sealed Air Corporation (NYSE: SEE), with more than 5,500 employees and revenues of $1 billion.

By 1978 he co-founded Oak Investment Partners with Stewart Greenfield and became Managing Partner.

Snyder's start-up Cambridge Machine Corporation, initiated the development and invention of high-speed mailing/envelope inserting machines.

These "well-known, full professors who had a lot of multidisciplinary post-docs" had formed a successful Boston-based business management consulting firm a Bio Information Associates (BIA) in 1980.

As Termeer described it, "Genzyme was just these professors from MIT and myself and some venture capitalists."

One of these professors was a Harvard chemistry professor, George M. Whitesides who founded many companies.

He is considered to be Genzyme's co-founder.

In 1981, Glassmeyer's entry into the then-embryonic biotechnology industry by starting up Genzyme—a biotechnology firm—was in response to Glassmeyer's challenge.

In its earliest moments "Genzyme was just really the combination" of Snyder and Henry Blair, a technician at the New England Enzyme Center at Tufts Medical School, who had worked for Roscoe Brady at the National Institute of Health (NIH).

According to Snyder, he and Blair "started developing a business on our own."

Blair had a contract with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to produce modified enzymes for the NIH and test it in clinical trials.

Roscoe and his colleagues had been working on a treatment for Gaucher's disease for over a decade at that time.

Snyder was transformed by the idea that entrepreneurs could "actually help people and save some lives."

Genzyme's first office was an old clothing warehouse adjacent to Tufts Medical School.

By 1983 Genzyme interviewed Baxter employee Henri Termeer, who had completed his MBA at Snyder's alma mater, the University of Virginia in 1973.

By that time Genzyme had seventeen employees who worked in an old clothing warehouse adjacent to Tufts Medical School.

Genzyme also had a small diagnostics operation in England.

By 1983 Genzyme developed close ties with a group of entrepreneurial professors from MIT and Harvard.

Snyder served as Genzyme's first Chairman, President and CEO until Henri Termeer was appointed as CEO in 1985.

In 1986, Snyder initiated the first sale of Genzyme stock shares (Initial Public Offering).

"In the formative years of biotechnology, Genzyme was the industry’s Apple, blazing a pathway for creating protein-based treatments for rare diseases."

In 1988 Termeer took over as Genzyme's Chairman.

In 1994 Snyder founded Argonex a small biotech start-up in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 1996, Snyder founded and served as chairman and chief executive officer of Upstate Biotechnology Incorporated, merging it with Argonex.

Upstate Inc. develops cell signaling products, technology platforms and services.

In 1999, the State of Virginia honored Snyder with its Biotechnology Lifetime Achievement Award.

Snyder received an Honorary Doctorate of Law degree from the University of Dundee in 2002.

Ed Glassmeyer, Senior Manager of the venture capital firm Oak Partners, funded many of Snyder's early start-up companies, mainly in electronics.

In 2003, he was appointed to Scotland’s International Advisory Board and serves as an advisor to the Scottish government on the development of its biotech sector.

In this capacity, Snyder played a role with the development of an 800000 sqft bioscience translational center outside Edinburgh.

Upstate was sold to Serologicals Corporation in 2004 for $205 million.

Snyder was honored OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2005 by HM Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom on the advice of the British government.