Gary Kurtzman

• 30+ years in healthcare including medicine, R&D, operations, venture capital and boards of directors
• Focus on companies launching and scaling their healthcare businesses

Gary focuses his decades of experience across the healthcare spectrum to help a new generation of disruptive healthcare technology companies. His specific areas of interest span from streamlining drug development, using data and advanced analytics to improve healthcare delivery, facilitating communication and information exchange between critical stakeholders, to expanding access and outcomes in patients with complex medical issues. He currently serves an advisor, board member and investor for several entrepreneurs and health tech companies.

Gary is also Senior Advisor at Safeguard Scientifics where he was previously Managing Director, Healthcare, responsible for identifying, deploying capital in, and supporting emerging healthcare technology and medical devices businesses. Gary remains a Board Member of several Safeguard partner companies including Moxe Health, meQuilibrium, Prognos, Syapse. Previous boards include Zipnosis (acquired by Bright Health), Velano Vascular and Alverix (each acquired by Becton Dickinson), Propeller Health (acquired by ResMed), Advanced BioHealing (acquired by Shire), and Avid Radiopharmaceuticals (acquired by Lilly). He currently also serves as independent board chairman at NuvoAir, MedCrypt and Oncora Medical.

Before joining Safeguard, Gary was Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at BioAdvance, a state initiative funding early-stage life sciences and healthcare companies. Previously, he was Chief Executive Officer at Pluvita Corporation, a company developing personalized medicine solutions and served as Chief Operating Officer at Genovo and head of research & development at Avigen, both development stage gene therapy companies. Gary began his career in industry with Gilead Sciences as virology group leader. Gary received his MD degree from Washington University, trained in internal medicine at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, MO, and completed hematology sub-specialty training at Stanford. He participated in post-doctoral research at both Stanford and the NIH.

Since 2006, Gary has taught an interdisciplinary graduate level course in entrepreneurship in the Healthcare Management Department at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. From the nearly one thousand MBA, MD and PhD candidates who have taken the course, many successful entrepreneurs, healthcare execs and VCs have emerged.