EURETINA 2023: Emerging therapies for exudative AMD

This year, the 23rd annual EURETINA Congress took place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Prior to the meeting, 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 and their potential applications in retina care.

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 talk down into stages, meaning programmes that are in Phase III stages. So the first one I will be talking about is OPT-302. As you're aware, OPT-302 showed positive results in the Phase II 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 programme in the Phase III stage which is actually looking at superior visual acuity, in the ongoing Phase III 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 programme I'll be talking about is gene therapy subretinal gene therapy with RGX314. That's also in Phase III 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 programme where uses AVA-vector takes the transgene for an anti-VEGF like Ranibizumab. So essentially we are suppressing disease, and an 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 III 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 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 II settings, in most cases, and there are different ways to deliver these. We have OTX-TKI, we have 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.