RWC 2024: Gene therapy associated uveitis

David Almeida, MD, PhD, MBA, presented on gene therapy associated uveitis at the 2024 Retina World Congress meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Video Transcript:

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

David Almeida, MD, PhD, MBA:

Hi, my name is David Almeida. I'm a vitreoretinal surgeon and President and CEO of Erie Retina Research and the Centers for Advanced Surgical Exploration. Glad to be here at sunny Florida for the Retina World Congress meeting, and my talk here is going to be on gene therapy associated uveitis (GTAU). And GTAU, the idea here is that probably about 10% of patients have to exit trials because of GTAU, even though we expect this in at least a quarter to a third. So how do we mitigate that that inflammatory response. Also recognizing that we need an inflammatory response in 100% of patients, that's how we activate the vector-based therapy. So these are some of the things that I'll be talking about, some pearls and some things looking forward to, to address these as more and more trials have viral vectors. And yeah, I think that they're going into in a very predictable, which is good for safety and for forecasting, where you're going to have a viral vector, whether that's a surgical one or an intravitreal one, and I think that you're probably going to have both products, but you're going to have that as, maybe, your main therapy, and then you're going to really cover it with either long-acting [inaudible] some other one. That's going to kind of deal with any breakthrough. So I think that's going to be the way to go forward.