ASRS 2023: GATHER 1 and GATHER 2 clinical trial for geographic atrophy results

At the 2023 ASRS meeting in Seattle, Washington, Carl Danzig, MD, caught up with our team to share the exciting results of the GATHER 1 and GATHER 2 clinical trials for avacincaptad pegol for the treatment of geographic atrophy.

Video Transcript

Editor's note - This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Carl Danzig, MD:

Hi, I'm Carl Danzig from the Rand Eye Institute in Deerfield Beach, Florida. I'm excited to be here at ASRS 2023 in the beautiful city of Seattle. I'm thrilled to be presenting a post-hoc analysis of vision loss in the GATHER program. Of note, I am a principal investigator, consultant, and speaker for Iveric bio.

In this clinical trial, patients with extrafoveal geographic atrophy were entered to receive, entered in to the trial to receive either avacincaptad pegol or sham. And, in the GATHER 1 and GATHER 2 trials, both trials met their primary endpoint. What we saw in our post-hoc analysis is that patients who received ACP 2 milligrams avacincaptad pegol had a lower proportion of 10, 15, or 20 letter vision loss.

Furthermore, there was a 56% risk relative risk reduction of persistent vision loss in the treatment arm. What does that mean? Persistent vision loss is 15 letter loss over 2 consecutive visits. We also looked at patients who had persistent vision loss of 10 and 20 letters, and the trend was consistent. And for the first time ever, we were able to correlate vision loss with geographic atrophy growth. And what we saw is that, in patients with vision loss, the ones that did not receive treatment had greater GA progression in the ACP treatment arm, whether or not they had vision loss, there were lower rates of GA progression.

So in the ones that did not have vision loss, they had around a 2.1 millimeter squared GA growth. But in the patients who did have vision loss, the GA progression was far less than the ones who receive sham. So we're excited for the potential of treatment with ACP 2 milligrams to reduce GA lesion growth and, hopefully, have decreased rate of vision loss. Thank you again.