Mark Gillies, MD, PhD, introduces the next generation of anti-VEGF agents

During the 2025 congress of the European Society of Retina Specialists (EURETINA), the Eye Care Network spoke with Mark Gillies, MD, PhD. Prof Gillies is affiliated with the University of Sydney, where he is the director of research at the Save Sight Institute. He also leads the Fight Retinal Blindness! Registry, a global database of clinician-reported patient data.Established in 2007, the registry tracks outcomes of anti-VEGF injections. Today, over 150 practitioners from 20 countries in Australia, Asia and Europe enter their patient data into the registry.

"The unique thing about our registries is we identified a minimum prospectively-identified outcome set that has to be tracked at every visit. If you try to finalise the data without entering all the in-range fields, then it won't accept it, and it tells you what you have to fill out. So, you get 100% quality data from every visit, for every patient, for the last 20 years. With this, we've been able to do many analyses," Prof Gillies said. "We've published about 100 publications over the last 15 years, and we distinguish ourselves from the other registries because they tend to scrape data. So the IRIS registry, for example, will just scrape electronic medical records, but they don't get complete data from every visit."

At the 2025 EURETINA meeting, Prof Gillies presented research findings on next-generation VEGF inhibitors, including Eylea HD and Vabysmo. "These things become stronger as you go," he noted. "So at the moment for Vabysmo, we have 2 years [of data], and for high dose Eylea it's just 1 year. But in 3 or 4 years, it will have really good amounts of data so that we can tell which drug is going to be best for which patient. We will also track the biosimilars as they come out. They haven't really been through such a thorough evaluation process, but we'll be tracking them just like the other drugs, and we'll see whether they really are as efficacious as they claim to be and as safe as they claim to be."

To learn about the research findings Prof Giliies presented at this year's EURETINA meeting, watch the full video.