What are attendees most looking forward to at this year's ASRS meeting?

Ahead of the American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) meeting, Sydney M. Crago, Assistant Managing Editor of Ophthalmology Times and Modern Retina, spoke with attendees and presenters. After learning about the individual presentations they'll be bringing to Stockholm, Sweden, she asked them one identical question: What topics are you most looking forward to discussing at this year's ASRS meeting?

Here's how they answered.

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

Rishi P. Singh, MD: Yeah, certainly we have some newer data coming out from the higher dose aflibercept studies, which we're excited to see. We have some 4- and 5-year data from some of the other extension trials now from faricimab that were excited to see now. And again, real-world, geographic atrophy drug use, we're seeing and hearing about more. We're going to hear more about the use of avacincaptad pegol, as well as pegcetacoplan in the real world, which is going to be interesting to hear what those takes are. They're going to really mimic what we saw with the initial rollout of these drugs as the as the drugs became live and approved by the FDA.

Paolo Antonio S. Silva, MD: I want to see work from other people: How our work or how other works are validated, how we see, you know, all the breakthroughs in retina. It's such an exciting time that we're at, and the ASRS provides a venue for us to be able to collaborate to hear each other's work.

Durga Borkar, MD: You know, I think ASRS is a really diverse meeting, and there's a lot presented. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing a lot of the first-time clinical trial result presentations, including the one I discussed, but also it's a great time to see interesting surgical cases. So I'm really looking forward to the surgical case video sessions where we see very, very novel surgical techniques presented each year.

Srinivas Sai Kondapalli, MD: To say the least, I think there's a lot of new therapies that are in the pipeline, both phase 2 as well as some phase 3 trials that are coming down the pipeline and treat a lot of our patients in different disease states. I'm especially interested in those that are dealing with certain disease states like MacTel, for example, as well as Stargardt disease. I think those are the two that I'm most interested in because they are, you could argue, perhaps a little bit rare diseases, but diseases that we unfortunately don't have great treatment options for, and we might be able to actually have greater benefits for patients coming down the pipeline.