RWC 2024: An IRIS database look at triamcinolone acetonide

Michael A. Singer, MD, shares details about the an IRIS database look at triamcinolone acetonide with Modern Retina at the 2024 Retina World Congress meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This study used real-world data to better understand patient response to treatment.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Michael A. Singer, MD:

Hello, my name is Michael Singer. I'm Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio and Director of Clinical Research at Medical Center Ophthalmology Associates. Today, I want to talk to you about a presentation I recently presented at the Retina World Congress down here in Fort Lauderdale, looking at the real world use of triamcinolone acetonide, given via suprachoroidal injection. What this was, was the first real-life study looking at the IRIS database of this medication to treat uveitic macular edema. The medication, for those of you not familiar, is injected into suprachoroidal space, which is a potential space, using the Clearside microinjector needle. It is triamcinolone acetonide, and it's to treat swelling, secondary uveitic macular edema. What we did was we did an IRIS database look at patients who were treated in real life. We looked at patients who, at least, had 6 months of treatment with this medication. And we went to the IRIS database as well as the Komodo database to see how many patients we could find that fit that criteria. Turns out, we had over 800 patients who actually met the criteria in terms of being followed for that period of time. And what we really wanted to figure out is how long does it last? Because, [interestingly] in real life, most trials underperform clinical trials. Okay, so medicines do really well in clinical trials, because they have a great patient population that are screened. And when you translate that to real life, you know, the results are just not as good. We wanted to see if that holds true for this. Well, it turns out, like I said, we had over 800 patients who met the criteria, and we looked at their length of follow up. And what we found was a couple of things. What was interesting to note was that 40% of these patients that were treated with this medication had a history of IOP elevation or glaucoma, which means that it seems to be appropriate for this high-risk patient population. In terms of duration of activity, 75% of people didn't need any steroid at all in terms of rescue over the six month period of time. And essentially, 87% of patients were able to go 6 months...without having another intravitreal injection of steroid. When they had the intravitreal injection of steroid, they ended up, half the time, having the suprachoroidal injection of steroid. Meaning that really, if you had injected a steroid, real people liked this enough to use it twice. So this information was very interesting because of the fact that in real life, this matched, pretty much, the data that was seen in the PEACHTREE analysis, but in the original PEACHTREE study, patients got a booster shot at 3 months. It turns out less than 10% of people needed that booster shot. Actually, less than 5%, in real life. What does that mean? That, that doctors, when they take this medicine, essentially give patients an injection and then the vast majority are followed up with 6 months with no need for boosters. So this is very encouraging. Further updates to this study will be done over the next few months and presented at numerous conferences to help get a better understanding how the IOP is affected with this medication. Thank you so much for your attention.