EURETINA 2023: Emerging therapies for exudative AMD
The 23rd annual EURETINA Congress took place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We spoke with Arshad M. Khanani, MD, MA, FASRS, who provided an overview of his presentation, "Emerging therapies for exudative AMD."
The 23rd annual EURETINA Congress took place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We spoke with Arshad M. Khanani, MD, MA, FASRS, who provided an overview of his presentation, "Emerging therapies for exudative AMD."
Here's what he had to say about these therapies.
Video Transcript
Editor's note - This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Sydney M Crago: Joining us today I have Dr Arshad Khanani, who is speaking at the EURETINA conference in Amsterdam this year. He'll be presenting on emerging therapies in AMD. Can you tell us a bit about your presentation?
Arshad Khanani, MD, MD, FASRS: Thank you. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to my talk. Traveling to Amsterdam for the EURETINA meeting. I'll be talking about emerging therapies for exudative AMD. And in my talk, I am giving an overview for, for our audience about the landscape of treatments for exudative AMD. We are involved with all clinical trials, essentially. So I can give my firsthand knowledge and share with the audience what I'm excited about.
So I'm breaking my top down into stages, meaning programs that are in phase 3 stages. So the first one I will be talking about is OPT-302. As you're aware that OPT 302 showed positive results in the phase 2 study neovascular AMD where patients who were treated with Ranibizumab plus OPT-302 had greater gains in visual acuity compared to Ranibizumab alone. And as a field, we know that levels of VEGF-C and -D go up in patients who get treated with VEFF-A inhibitors and blocking VEGF-C and -D with OPT-302. In combination with VEGF-A blockade may be meaningful in terms of visual acuity. So this is the only program in the phase 3 stage which is actually looking at superior visual acuity in the ongoing phase 3 studies the COAST and the SHORE studies that are currently recruiting, and we hope that in combination with VEGF-A inhibitors OPT-302, will get vision better than standard of care.
The next program I'll be talking about is gene therapy subretinal gene therapy with RGX314. That's also in phase 3 ASCENT and ATMOSPHERE trials. And the exciting thing about gene therapy obviously is reduction in treatment burden, and how we can we can control disease in most of the patients with a single treatment or decrease the treatment burden and this data is important because you know in the phase 1/2 study we saw extended durability of a single subretinal injection of our RGX314, which is a program where uses AVA-vector takes the transgene for an anti-VEGF like Ranibizumab. So essentially we are suppressing disease and exciting thing about gene therapy is that because of continuous sustained delivery, we may be able to control anatomy better, which may lead to better long term outcomes. That's yet to be seen in, in, in a phase 3 setting but I'm excited about you know the ongoing ASCENT and ATMOSPHERE studies.
And then there's intravitreal gene therapies; I'll be talking about INFINITY, ADVM-022 as well as 4D-150. These are in clinic gene therapies where the trans genes are expressing aflibercept in both cases, and then 4D-150 also a messenger interference mRNA for a VEGF-C. And then the Lastly, I'll be talking about TKIs. We are excited to have tyrosine kinase inhibitors that are moving forward in, in clinical trials during the phase 2 settings in most cases and there are different ways to deliver these, we have OTX-TKI, we eyepoint EYP as well as Clearside CLS-AX. So I'll be giving a summary of that. So hopefully the audience will be excited to hear about the emerging treatment frequencies for exudative AMD, and I hope to cover and give an overview to them about all the upcoming treatments.
