Our team

Professor Jordi Monés is the Director of the Institut de la Màcula, Director of the Barcelona Macula Foundation, Associate Professor at the John A. Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah Health (USA), and Director of the AMD Disease Area at Perceive Biotherapeutics, California (USA).

He earned his medical degree and PhD “cum laude” in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Barcelona. He specialized in Ophthalmology at the Barraquer Ophthalmology Center, Autonomous University of Barcelona, from 1986 to 1989. He completed a Retina Research Fellowship at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard University (Boston, USA), in 1990 and 1991, and a Clinical Retina Fellowship at Hospital San José, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), in 1992.

Since 2007, he has been Director of the Institut de la Màcula in Barcelona (an accredited center of the European Vision Institute’s excellence research network) at Centro Médico Teknon. He has also served as Medical Director and co-founder of the Barcelona Macula Foundation since 2011, with a mission to fight blindness by supporting and conducting research into retinal diseases that currently have no treatment. In addition, since February 2023, he has been Associate Professor at the John A. Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah Health (USA), and since September 2022, Director of the AMD Disease Area at Perceive Biotherapeutics (California, USA).

His main research interests include pathophysiology, multimodal imaging, biomarkers, clinical trial design, and emerging therapies for all forms of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), with a specific focus on the atrophic and intermediate forms, as well as retinal dystrophies, regenerative medicine, stem cells, the microbiome, and gene therapy.

Over the past 20 years, he has been the principal investigator in most major international multicenter clinical trials for the treatment of all forms of AMD, including Phase I-IV trials and trials he has initiated himself. He is currently leading several trials on exudative AMD, intermediate AMD, atrophic AMD, Stargardt disease, and retinitis pigmentosa (RP).

Professor Jordi Monés has been a pioneer in the development of emerging therapies for atrophic AMD. In 2005, he had the vision to encourage the US biotech company Ophtohotech to combine a drug intended for exudative AMD with anti-VEGF treatment for use in patients with atrophic AMD. This led to a Phase I trial and, for the first time at the Institut de la Màcula, CM Teknon, intravitreal anti-complement therapy was administered to human patients. This became the foundation for the drug now known as Avacincaptad Pegol, which has shown significant results in slowing the progression of geographic atrophy and vision loss, representing one of the most important advances of the past decade.

Over the last 20 years, he has published extensively and studied the characterization, origin, and prognosis of various disease phenotypes. He has participated in numerous clinical trials and in international scientific advisory roles for research projects on atrophic AMD (Roche, Iveric, Annexon, CellCure, Lineage), with a special mention for his advisory role in the development of the first approved drug for atrophic AMD, Pegcetacoplan (Syfovre, Apellis).

He is also actively involved in the field of regenerative therapy using stem cells. He has worked with stem cell therapy in large animal models and created a mini-pig model with well-defined atrophy mimicking human geographic atrophy, evaluating the safety of human RPE-derived iPSC cell implantation.

He also contributed to the new formulation of retinal progenitor cells used by ReNeuron in a Phase II human clinical trial and participated in ReNeuron’s Phase II extension study, implanting embryonic retinal progenitor cells in a patient with retinitis pigmentosa for the first time in Europe.

Recently, Professor Jordi Monés discovered and described cases of retinal restoration/regeneration in patients with geographic atrophy following subretinal implantation of RPE-derived embryonic stem cells (Lineage Cell Therapeutics).

Currently, as Director of the AMD Disease Area at Perceive Biotherapeutics and Associate Professor at the University of Utah Health, he actively contributes to the development of gene therapy for atrophic and intermediate AMD.
Likewise, he is currently leading a Phase 3 gene therapy clinical trial involving a single injection for the treatment of atrophic AMD, which is currently in the patient recruitment phase.

He is a member of various research groups, such as the CAM Study Group, and serves as a scientific advisor and Steering Committee member for several clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including Novartis, Kodiak, Bayer, Genentech, Allegro, EyeBio, and Notalvision. Additionally, he has served as the principal investigator in four major projects funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program: EYERISK, LITE, PRO4VIP, and ADVANCECAT consortia.

He has published over a hundred articles in scientific journals and specialized books and has given more than 500 presentations, lectures, or talks at international conferences and meetings. He is a member of 12 scientific societies. Professor Jordi Monés is a member of the four most prestigious retina societies: the Macula Society, Retina Society, Club Jules Gonin, and the American Society of Retina Specialists.

According to expertscape.com, which objectively ranks individuals and institutions based on expertise in over 29,000 biomedical topics, Dr. Jordi Monés has held the top position in both atrophic and exudative AMD in Spain from 2013 to the present, and ranks 26th and 25th worldwide, respectively.