Eye Health Academy Faculty

Public Profile

Albert Maguire, MD
Albert Maguire, MD
      Dr. Maguire, is a professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves on the retina service. He is also a clinical associate of the Division of Pediatric Ophthalmology at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Maguire received his MD from Harvard Medical School and completed an internship in surgery at Yale-New Haven Hospital and a residency in ophthalmology at the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Maguire completed a combined medical/surgical retinal fellowship at the William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan and returned to Johns Hopkins as the Associate Chief of Service before coming to Penn Medicine and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1992. Dr. Maguire's areas of clinical expertise are in the diagnosis and management of vitreoretinal diseases with a special interest in pediatric and genetic retinal diseases. With more than 200 scholarly articles in print, Dr. Maguire’s research has been published in journals such as, The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Science Translational Medicine, and Nature Genetics. He has served on numerous clinical research studies, including studies of retinopathy of prematurity, AIDS-related eye disease, vitrectomy for macular hole study, complications of age related macular degeneration studies, and laboratory investigations in gene therapy approaches to treat incurable retinal degenerative disease including Leber's Congenital Amaurosis—a retinal disease causing blindness in newborn infants. He has been the Principal Investigator of all of the retinal gene therapy studies carried out at Penn and CHOP on RPE65 deficiency and choroideremia. Together, Dr. Maguire and Dr. Jean Bennett – partners in life and in work – are Co-Directors of the Center for Advanced Retinal and Ocular Therapeutics (CAROT). They collaborate on basic and clinical research projects with the aim of developing novel therapies for incurable retinal and macular degenerative diseases. Their research over the past 25 years resulted in implementation of the first retinal gene therapy clinical trial in the U.S. (2007, for Leber Congenital Amaurosis, LCA). This was also the first trial to carry out gene therapy for a non-lethal disease in pediatric subjects. Dr. Maguire was also the first to inject both eyes in a gene therapy clinical trial. He has been the principal investigator of the only Phase III gene therapy trial for an eye disease. This work has led to the first U.S. FDA approved gene therapy drug (Luxturna) delivered directly to human subjects. They have thus significantly advanced the potential application of gene therapy for a broad range of diseases in the eye and paved the way for uses outside of the eye.
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