Gur Roshwalb

Partner
aMoon Fund
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Dr. Gur Roshwalb is a Partner at aMoon, where he leads sourcing efforts and deals, manages the due diligence process, and sits on the boards of aMoon Growth portfolio companies AltruBio, BioSplice, KAHR, Mina Therapeutics, and Viracta Therapeutics.

Beginning his career as a practicing physician, Gur understands the urgency driving innovation in the healthcare industry. He moved to Israel in 2019 to work with aMoon to accelerate HealthTech advances into clinical practice.

Gur has over 20 years of healthcare industry and finance experience. Prior to joining aMoon, he was CEO at several private and public biotech companies. Previously, Gur was a Vice President at Venrock, where he was an investment professional on the healthcare team investing in both private and public companies.

Gur started his finance career at Piper Jaffray, where he worked as a Vice President and equity analyst, publishing research on specialty pharmaceutical companies. Prior to Piper, Gur was in private practice in New York following residency training in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he also served as Chief Resident.

Gur obtained his MD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, his MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business, and his BA from Columbia University.
 

Speech title & Synopsis

Investors viewpoint on cell and gene therapy

The fundamental issue with cell and gene therapy is two fold—the relatively higher cost to develop and the very high cost of the therapy. While there are some early examples of commercial success, as we have seen, there has not been broad market adoption as expected. In the case of cell therapy, we have seen early market adoption in liquid tumors, as the initial success rate was very high. But autologous manufacturing and high costs, as well as short duration of response are limitations. Added to this are the number of companies that have pursued the same targets (BCMA, CD19), whether in cancer of autoimmunity. The general key to any company is how to sustainably differentiate . further, given the high costs of manufacturing in cell therapy, we believe the in vivo cell therapies are the likely future. For gene therapy, the reimbursement model remains a problem, as well as the inability redose patients and the usual concerns about insertional mutagenesis. As gene therapy has largely been abandoned for the moment by large pharma, the question becomes how to re-imagine this approach from both a delivery point of view, as well as, a reimbursement point of view.