A Sister's Quest for a Cure

Margie McGlynn, MBA '93 and BS '82, president of the Homocystinuria Network America, has endowed a professorship in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences to find holistic solutions for rare genetic diseases like the one that took the lives of two of her sisters in childhood.

After losing two sisters in childhood to a rare metabolic disease called homocystinuria, Margie decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and enter the pharmacy profession. She earned her pharmacy degrees and MBA from UB, and worked in the pharmaceutical industry for decades, helping identify unmet needs, bringing new products to market and maximizing patient access. In 2016, she established a nonprofit organization called HCU Network America to help patients with the condition and related disorders manage their disease, with the goal of one day finding a cure.  

Realizing the need for a holistic approach to educate and train professionals to help patients with genetic conditions, Margie also recently made the major decision to leverage the resources at the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences through a gift to endow a chair. “I want the school and this position to take on a leadership role and figure out what the educational modules across disciplines need to be,” McGlynn says. “Nutritionists, nurses, ophthalmologists, mental health counselors—whatever the case may be—all different disciplines need to learn about these diseases in order to treat them holistically.”

Living Healthier Lives

At UB we have always understood that to prepare students for the real world, they’d need real-world experience. Improving lives through health isn’t just an opportunity, it’s a responsibility. Our students, faculty and alumni work tirelessly to create solutions that affect real change in the lives of patients and their families, whether they are in Western New York or around the world. Often, these solutions start right at home, motivated by heartbreak experienced by families within the UB community.

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