Jordi Monés is Director of Institut de la Màcula, Director of the Barcelona Macula Foundation, and Adjunct Professor at John A Moran Eye Center, University of Utah Health, USA.
He earned his degree and PhD cum laude in Medicine and Surgery at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He specialized in Ophthalmology at the Centro de Oftalmología Barraquer, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, from 1986-1989. He completed his Research Retina Fellowship at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary at Harvard University, Boston, the USA, in 1990 and 1991, and a Clinical Retina Fellowship at the Hospital San José at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Mexico, in 1992.
Since 2007, he has been the Director of the Institut de la Màcula in Barcelona (accredited site of the network of excellence in research, the European Vision Institute) within the Centro Medico Teknon Hospital campus. He is also the Medical Director and one of the founder governors of the Barcelona Macula Foundation: Research for Vision since 2011, whose mission is to fight blindness, supporting and conducting research in retinal diseases that currently have no treatment. He has been an Adjunct Professor at John A Moran Eye Center, University of Utah Health, since February 2023.
His particular research fields are the pathophysiology, imaging, endpoints, biomarkers, clinical trial design, and emerging therapies for AMD, with a specific interest both in the end-stage atrophic and the intermediate form, as well as for retinal dystrophies, regenerative medicine, stem cells, microbiome, and gene therapy.
For the past 20 years, he has been the Principal Investigator in most of the international multicentre clinical trials for treating AMD or conducting phase I–IV and Investigator-driven clinical trials. He is currently participating in or designing clinical trials for exudative AMD, intermediate AMD, atrophic AMD, Stargardt’s disease and Retinitis pigmentosa (RP).
He has worked in regenerative stem-cell therapy in a large animal model, creating a mini-pig model of well-defined atrophy mimicking GA in humans and evaluating the safety of implanting human RPE-derived iPSC cells. Dr. Monés also contributed to the new formulation of retinal progenitor stell cells used by ReNeuron in its Phase II clinical trial in humans. He also participated in the ReNeuron Phase II extension clinical trial, implanting embryonic retinal progenitors in a patient with RP for the first time in Europe.
In 2005, he envisioned encouraging the US biotech Ophthotech to use a drug, that at that time was intended for exudative AMD in combination with anti-VEGF therapy, in patients with atrophic AMD. This led to the conduction of a Phase I trial, and at the Institut de la Màcula, anti-complement therapy was intravitreally administered for the first time in human patients. This was the pioneer seed for the drug currently named avacincaptad pegol, which, after almost 20 years, has shown significant results in preventing the progression of geographic atrophy and visual loss, and it is one of the first and only two drugs approved by the FDA for this condition.
He recently discovered and described retinal restoration/regeneration cases in patients with geographic atrophy after subretinal implantation of RPE-derived embryonic stem cells (Lineage Cell Therapeutics).
Dr Monés, as adjunct Prof. at University of Utah and as scientific advisor of Perceive Biotherapeutics, is currently contributing to the development of a gene therapy for atrophic and intermediate AMD.
He is a member of various research groups, such as the CAM Study Group, and a scientific advisor or member of the Steering Committees of several other pharma and related clinical trials (PerceiveBio, Iveric, Apellis, Novartis, Roche, Kodiak, Genentech, Allegro, EyeBio, Annexon, Aviceda, Nanoscope, Panther Pharmaceuticals) and biotech companies, such as the CellCure/Lineage and ReNeuron in the stem cell regenerative therapy field. He has recently participated as principal investigator in four major projects funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme: the EYERISK, the LITE, the PRO4VIP, and the ADVANCE CAT Consortiums.
He has published over 100 articles in scientific journals and specialist books and has given over 500 presentations, conferences, or talks at international congresses and meetings. He is a member of 12 scientific societies. Prof Monés is one of the 5 European specialists and one of the 40 international specialists that belong to the 4 major retina societies: Macula Society, Retina Society, Club Jules Gonin, and American Society of Retina Specialists.
According to Expertscape.com, which objectively ranks people and Institutions by their expertise in more than 29,000 biomedical topics, Dr. Jordi Monés has ranked #1 in both atrophic and wet AMD in Spain since 2013 and #26 and #25 worldwide.
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