Dr. William Peranteau is Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania and the Adzick-McCausland Distinguished Chair in Fetal and Pediatric Surgery at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). His clinical practice focuses on the surgical care of children, with an emphasis on neonatal surgery for congenital diseases. He is one of four pediatric surgeons in CHOP’s Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment (CFDT), the world’s largest fetal treatment center caring for patients with structural and genetic birth defects. As a member of the CFDT, Bill routinely counsels families following a prenatal diagnosis of a congenital anomaly and, in select cases, performs fetal surgery before birth.

Bill’s clinical work directly informs his research, which focuses on developing prenatal therapeutic approaches, including prenatal gene editing, for genetic diseases with limited or no treatment options. He is Co-Director of the Center for Fetal Research at CHOP, where he leads a translational research laboratory focused on prenatal and early postnatal cell and gene therapies.

He has led teams in some of the first studies demonstrating the feasibility of in utero CRISPR-mediated gene editing in small and large animal models and has led preclinical studies of in utero hematopoietic stem cell transplantation critical to its clinical translation. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and the NIH Common Fund’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing Program, as well as the American College of Surgeons, the Gerber Foundation, and the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics and Orphan Disease Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bill, a proud New Jersey native, graduated from Princeton University and received his medical degree from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. During medical school, he took additional time to initiate his research in prenatal cell and gene therapy as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Student Fellow. He completed General Surgery Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, during which he also completed a three-year research fellowship in Fetal Therapies at CHOP. He subsequently completed his training in Pediatric and Fetal Surgery at CHOP.