Vitreoretinal surgeons Dr. Sunir Garg and Dr. Sidra Zafar discuss exciting innovations in GA treatment. For further information, read their article in the July/August issue, Rapid Developments in Geographic Atrophy. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Sunir Garg, MD: Every day, we’re seeing a lot of patients with geographic atrophy, and as the American population gets older, there seems to be more and more people that are affected by this every day. We’re really fortunate to have two FDA-approved treatments for geographic atrophy. They’re a big advance forward, but I think there’s still room for improvement. Are there any particular research programs that you’re most interested in, Sidra?

Sidra Zafar, MD: Yeah, so Regeneron is working on a subcutaneous injection for GA; it seems to be very promising. I think, for patients, that might be a great added advantage—that they can just do it at home instead of coming to clinics repeatedly. Any particular products that you are looking forward to?

Sunir Garg, MD: There’s a lot of interest in the subcutaneous approach. Apellis, that makes pegcetacoplan, is looking at that in conjunction with the subcutaneous approach, the idea being that if we can more effectively reduce complement activity, that may help further slow geographic atrophy growth.

And building on your idea of patients who, really, if they can get the convenience of a treatment that’s longer lasting—whether at home or in gene therapy—that’s a huge advantage. There’s a few different gene therapy products that are currently in clinical research programs. One is by Johnson & Johnson, which inhibits the MAC, which is really interesting. Another company out of England, called Complement Therapeutics, has a subretinal gene therapy approach. The preclinical data looks really great. We’re looking forward to going into the clinic pretty soon. So, there’s a lot of interesting work being done, and hopefully we’ll have better treatments for our patients in the future. OM