Giant yellow Post-It Notes line the hallway outside faculty offices in the pediatric pulmonary division with messages to consider like, “Is this our goal?” It’s a strategic planning day, and Peter Mogayzel, director of the Eudowood Division of Respiratory Sciences since January 2019, is ready to get to work.
“We’re trying to position ourselves to be the destination of choice for treating pediatric pulmonary disease in the region,” he says. “We are working to enhance our basic science and clinical research, and foster our fellowship program. We’re not trying to be the biggest practice on the East Coast — we’re trying to be one that’s providing the best possible care and one seen as a referral center for children with complex needs.”
It’s the same careful consideration he has applied throughout his career. Mogayzel’s interest in medicine started when he was a high school student growing up in New England. He earned his M.D. and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Boston University, then headed west to the University of Washington, Seattle, for a pediatrics internship and residency, where he first encountered a patient with cystic fibrosis (CF). He came to Johns Hopkins Children’s Center for a pediatric pulmonary and critical care fellowship in 1994 and made it his home.
Mogayzel has since become an internationally recognized expert in CF, having headed the Johns Hopkins Cystic Fibrosis Center since 2002 and serving on the board of directors for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He has taken on additional leadership roles over the years, serving as medical director of the pediatric lung transplantation program and the pediatric specialty clinics, and as one of the key drivers behind Johns Hopkins adoption of the Epic electronic health-records system.
Mogayzel “has worn many hats [at Johns Hopkins] and he’s worn them all very, very well,” says Beryl Rosenstein, professor emeritus of pediatrics and former director of the Johns Hopkins Cystic Fibrosis Clinic, who has worked with Mogayzel since his fellowship days. “He communicates well in a quiet manner, and is viewed by all as a leader. Patients love him and sing high praise for all of his efforts.”
The past year has been an exciting one for Mogayzel. The first CF patient he treated at Johns Hopkins turned 25; he gave a plenary talk on the evolution of CF care at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference in Nashville; and partnerships in clinical trials of Trikafta, the first triple combination therapy drug for patients with the most common CF mutation, which led to its approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
He is now working on additional studies of Trikafta and other modulator drugs — which help stop the downward trajectory of lung function commonly seen in CF — in infants. Mogayzel also has his eye on potential future gene therapies. One study is evaluating the promise of using an inhaled form of messenger RNA to help produce normal proteins in patients affected by CF, who have defects in the CFTR protein that typically helps maintain a balance of salt and water on the lung and other surfaces.
“The future for CF is really moving toward developing therapies for the last 10 percent of the population that don’t have one now, and then hopefully moving toward a cure,” Mogayzel says. “We think these drugs are going to reshape the way we care for patients with CF because we’re going to have a much healthier population of children, where we can move more to telemedicine and nonhospital-based care.”