Albert M. Maguire, MD.
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Albert M. Maguire, Ph.D.

Dr. Albert Maguire graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Psychology from Princeton University. He received his MD degree from Harvard Medical School and completed an internship in Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and a Residency in Ophthalmology at the Wilmer Institute, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He served as Chief Resident at Wilmer, completed a combined medical/surgical retinal fellowship at the William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan and was recruited to University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in 1992. Dr. Maguire is currently the F.M. Kirby Professor of Ophthalmology and the Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Retinal and Ophthalmic Therapeutics (CAROT) at the UPenn Perelman School of Medicine.

Dr. Maguire has devoted his research career to the conduct of gene therapy translational studies. His research and clinical expertise made it possible to test the first definitive retinal gene therapy treatment for patients with blinding retinal degenerations. He developed the methodology and carried out the majority of the preclinical surgical small and large animal gene therapy surgeries. Those studies yielded the safety and efficacy results that enabled progression to clinical trials for teams developing gene therapy for RPE65 deficiency.

He served as Principal Investigator for the Phase 1-III gene therapy trials that led to the first USA FDA-approved in vivo gene therapy product (Luxturna™. 2017), a product now administered in numerous countries. During the trials, Dr. Maguire was the first to: 1) enroll pediatric subjects with a non-lethal disease as gene therapy participants, 2) carry out ocular gene therapy readministration and 3) run the first randomized, controlled, multi-center gene therapy Phase 3 gene therapy trial targeting a genetic disease.

Dr. Maguire has been the PI and surgeon for several other gene therapy clinical trials, including choroideremia, one for the neovascular form of age-related macular degeneration, and he was the surgeon for the first CRISPR-Cas gene editing gene therapy clinical trial (for a congenital blindness). He also helped develop gene therapy surgical training programs, thereby expanding access to this technology around the world.

An internationally recognized expert in gene therapy, Dr. Maguire has authored more than 120 peer-reviewed papers. He received The Retina Research Foundation Pyron Award, the Retina International Special Recognition Award, the Charles L. Schepens Award, the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and was a co-recipient of the Champalimaud Vision Award and the Greenberg Prize to End Blindness.