Both are randomized trials to test the effectiveness of Avastin against Lucentis in treating people with wet AMD.
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It is now focused on seeking treatments for major eye diseases, including Wet AMD, or age-related macular degeneration.
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At one point, the US Department of Veteran Affairs suspended Avastin usage for treating wet AMD ( back story).
Patients with wet AMD can lose their sight within just three to five months of being diagnosed with the condition.
Verteporfin, marketed by the drug firm Novartis as Visudyne, aims to stop the progressive loss of vision associated with wet AMD.
The face off between Lucentis and Avastin may well become moot given the pricing of new treatments for wet AMD, such as Eylea.
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In the recently ended third quarter, Eylea captured roughly one-third of the branded market share for wet AMD, according to Regeneron ceo Leonard Schleifer.
The agency also tagged NECC for sending promotional materials to ophthalmologists, when the drug was not approved for wet AMD ( see here).
However, they suggested using the drug may need to be reappraised in high-risk patients such as those with wet AMD in one eye already.
But the landscape changed a year ago when the FDA approved yet another drug for wet AMD, Eylea, which is sold by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Many doctors are turning to Avastin itself to treat wet AMD.
Lucentis, approved in June for wet AMD, is essentially a fragment of the monoclonal antibody that was used to make the company's colon cancer drug Avastin.
Moreover, there are additional factors buttressing a need for caution: Two retrospective analyses of Medicare claims both found increased risks of stroke and death among patients using Avastin for wet AMD over Lucentis.
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The problem is that Lucentis was subject to all the clinical and regulatory hurdles required for approval to treat wet AMD, and the manufacturer (Genenetech in the US, Novartis elsewhere) has had to monitor all subsequent use for adverse events.
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This is why there are good statistical reasons to be cautious about jumping on the Avastin bandwagon for wet AMD just because it appears to work as well as Lucentis: Simply, the trend for adverse effects from Avastin is greater when the sample of patients is bigger.
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Thanks to medicines made by the New England Compounding Center, which led to an outbreak of fungal meningitis that has claimed 33 lives ( look here), there is increased betting that Eylea will capture still more market share, since compounded Avastin is used by ophthalmologists to treat wet AMD.
This is the dilemma doctors now face with Lucentis (which was originally developed to treat wet AMD and which passed all the regulatory protocols for doing so here in the US and in Europe) and Avastin, a drug with a similar underlying mechanistic effect, that was, however, designed to treat cancer.
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Over a period of years, dry AMD can progress to a gradual deterioration of retinal cells, which can result in severe vision loss or lead to the wet version of AMD.
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By the end of the study, the researchers showed that 9.3% of patients taking aspirin developed wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared with 3.7% of patients who did not take aspirin.
Two breakthrough drugs from Genentech (nyse: DNA - news - people ) offer hope for patients with the more severe "wet" form of age-related macular degeneration, or AMD.
There is no treatment for dry AMD, but there are a number of treatments for the wet form of the condition.
There are two forms of age-related macular degeneration, or AMD: the dry form, known as non-neovascular, and the wet form, called neovascular.
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