EURETINA 2024: Tyrosine kinase inhibitors and safety data for patients with non proliferative diabetic retinopathy

At the European Society of Retina Specialists (EURETINA) Congress, Veeral S. Sheth, MD, MBA, FASRS, FACS, took time to chat with the Eye Care Network. At the Ophthalmology Times Europe booth, he spoke about the outcome of the Phase 1 HELIOS trial (NCT05695417), assessing the axitinib intravitreal implant (OTX-TKI) for diabetic retiopathy, wet age-related macular degeneration and other retinal diseases.

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

Veeral Sheth, MD, MBA, FASRS, FACS: My name is Veeral Sheth. I'm from Chicago, Illinois. I'm a clinical assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and director of clinical trials at University Retina and Macula Associates. At EURETINA, I presented data from the Phase 1 HELIOS trial, which looked at a TKI, or a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, specifically axitinib in the treatment of non proliferative diabetic retinopathy (NDPR) in patients without center-involving DME. There were a couple of key takeaways from this study. This is a phase 1 study, so the biggest takeaway is safety. What we saw in this group of patients that received OTX[-TKI] is that none of them had vasculitis, iritis, no IOI, which is great to see today, and none of them needed rescue therapy. So that was good to see that safety signal. From an efficacy standpoint. We looked at DRSS score, so the OTX[-TKI] group had a 2-step improvement in 23% of patients, and 46% had some DRSS improvement, versus the sham group, which none of the patients had any improvement. And then when we look at DRSS worsening, we saw that 25% of the sham group actually got worse over the course of this 48-week study, whereas none of the OTX[TKI] group patients did, and so that's good to see that we see disease stability in these NPDR patients.

Well, Barcelona is one of my favorite cities. I think there's a couple things that I'm excited about in particular with this meeting. One is catching up with colleagues from all over the world. My good friend, Arshad Kanani, is all over this place. This is basically the "Kanani meeting," which is great to see. Yeah, I think that there's a ton of great new data coming out: there's systemic medications for diabetics, there's subcutaneous injections, there's gene therapy. So, there's a lot of new modalities and mechanisms of action that are being explored, which is really exciting to see.