Retina Fellows Forum: Emerging therapies for AMD

David Hutton of Ophthalmology Times talks with Adrienne Scott, MD, FASRS, about her part in a panel discussion detailing emerging therapies for AMD.

Video Transcript

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

David Hutton:

I'm David Hutton of Ophthalmology Times. The Retina Fellows Forum is being held in Chicago, and Dr Adrienne Scott is taking part in a panel discussion detailing emerging therapies for AMD. Thank you so much for joining us today. Tell us a little bit about this panel.

Adrienne Scott, MD, FASRS:

Thank you, David, and thank you for the kind invitation to join you today. Well, I am honored to be able to give a panel discussion to just kind of talking about the emergent therapies for neovascular age-related macular degeneration or wet AMD. The audience consists of co-faculty for the meeting, and also a very unique audience of vitreoretinal fellows in fellowship training. So my talk is discussing emerging therapies for wet AMD and in my limited time I am trying to summarize all of the current therapies and touch on, really the emerging therapies that I think it's important [that] our fellows in training, need to be aware of things that potentially come to market, things are new to market, and things that will be the topics of further conversations as we continue to have more and more innovations and wet AMD treatment. Given the limited amount of time my talk is not comprehensive. We're not discussing all the excitement of dry AMD therapies these days. But I'm hoping that after this talk, any of the fellows in training will be able to be conversant on the current management strategies, and also be able to discuss some future innovations as far as pharmacotherapeutics and helping our patients with wet AMD.

David Hutton:

And what's the takeaway message for attendees.

Adrienne Scott, MD, FASRS:

Well, no matter where our fellows end up practicing, either in private practice or in academia or in, you know, managed care organizations and the practice of retina, we're going to come across patients with wet AMD. It's certainly a large growing sector of the population giving the likelihood of us aging and living longer these days. So my take home point is that there are lots of different therapies and at the center of your treatment decision has to be the patient. So we're in a very great time in the world of retina where we have a lot of choices. And it gets kind of confusing with all the different choices. But I typically say this to myself, and I think any advice I would give for the fellow is to kind of center your decision around the patient. And if it were your relative, if it were your eye, what kind of treatment do you think would be the best outcome? And many of the treatments have certain attributes that are better for some patients and not as good for other patients. So, when in doubt, just think about the patients, and I think we have so many great out- great medicines these days to be able to guarantee better outcomes than we ever had before and keep the patient in mind first.