EURETINA 2023: The Real-World Efficacy and Safety of Faricimab in Neovascular AMD: The TRUCKEE Study

The 23rd annual EURETINA Congress is finally underway in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We spoke with David Almeida, MD, PhD, MBA who provided an overview of his presentation, "The Real-World Efficacy and Safety of Faricimab in Neovascular AMD: The TRUCKEE Study." Here's what he had to say about the meeting and his research.

Video Transcript

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

David Hutton: I'm David Hutton of Ophthalmology Times. I'm joined today by Dr David Almeida, who presented the real-world efficacy and safety of faricimab and neovascular AMD: The TRUCKEE study at EURETINA 2023 in Amsterdam. Thank you so much for joining us today. Tell us about your presentation.

David Almeida, MD, PhD, MBA: Well, thanks very much, David, And thanks for having me on here. My name is Dr David AlmeIda. I'm vitreoretinal specialist, and director and President of Clinical Research at Erie Retinal Research in Erie, Pennsylvania. And it's really thrilled to be here with David and kind of speaking to you about the presentation that I did a EURETINA in Amsterdam this year called the TRUCKEE study. And the TRUCKEE study looks at the real world efficacy and safety of faricimab in neovascular AMD, and the idea here is to really try to get early real-world understanding of how patients are dealing with and kind of taking on this treatment for neovascular age-related macular degeneration.

So what we found is that there's a few key things, we know a few things happen after drugs approved, and that is that initial experience with different retinal specialists is, it's going to be treatment-resistant, recalcitrant, chronic advanced cases, not necessarily the cases that mirror the population into clinical trials. So with, with TRUCKEE and real-world experience, we tried to bring all those patients every type of patient that you sent, you're likely to see in that early first year or so of treatment, and see how they, what they did. What we found is that whether you're talking about 1 injection, or 3 injections, or multiple injections beyond those numbers, patients that were coming in treatment naive or switched most coming from aflibercept, did well with improving vision and usually a longer treatment interval in between injections.

So we're kind of addressing both the durability and treatment burden aspect of it, but ultimately efficacy as well, which is patients are always interested in how many letters they're going to get. So we're going to continue this study to TRUCKEE, there's also one called TAHOE that we're doing for diabetic macular edema, and to contribute more of this real-world first experiences for retina specialists across both the US and the world.

David Hutton: Ultimately, what can this mean for retina specialists and the patients they treat?

David Almeida, MD, PhD, MBA:It's gonna give us an ability to extrapolate and take from the clinical trial population for the registry trials, and then add a bunch of different types of patients these kinds of treatment resistant, recalcitrant these other patients that are going to have treatment and then see how they apply so that we can kind of bridge those extrapolating results and see how we can expect clinical evolution in these patients.