The below transcript has been edited for clarity.
Nathan M. Radcliffe, MD: Hello, I am Nathan Radcliffe, and I’m here with my friend and colleague, Sean Ianchulev, MD, MPH, who is also the founder of Iantrek. We just have a couple of minutes here, but I wanted to hear your take on how we should be getting the best option for outflow in our moderate, from maybe mild, moderate, or severe glaucoma patients who need meaningful IOP reduction.
Sean Ianchulev, MD, MPH: Well, thank you. It's really interesting what's happening today because in the surgical space, I think we’re reenacting a little bit the multi-decade paradigm in pharmacotherapy. As we know in pharmacotherapy in the clinic, we started out more with trabecular outflow drugs, and then we evolved to a point where now the first-line treatment is uveoscleral outflow. Now we always say the primary outflow, the conventional outflow, is the trabecular outflow, and maybe the uveoscleral is secondary, which is probably true. But in terms of therapeutic index, what we have learned from the pharmacotherapy is from a therapeutic index perspective, your uveoscleral agents are more efficacious and give you more bang for the buck.
As surgeons, when we go to the OR today, pretty much 95% of surgery is outflow-based. Almost all the time we're sticking mostly to above the uveoscleral outflow, mostly trabecular. So, I think that with the AlloFlo, which is the first biointerventional outflow, uveoscleral outflow product, we are addressing the uveoscleral outflow. [At this meeting] we are introducing the AlloSpan technology, which is a canaloplasty with a durable biointerventional approach where we use allograft tissue again to enhance the trabecular outflow.
Where I think we should be going, especially in the moderate and more advanced patients or standalone, is why not do a total outflow intervention where we address both outflow tracks for a comprehensive solution. A lot of surgeons are already having some experience with that, and that may be something that we should see if it becomes part of our treatment paradigm.
Dr. Radcliffe: Beautiful. And yeah, it is true. You're also using the 2 physiologic outflow pathways that are working in every healthy eye.
Dr. Ianchulev: Right.
Dr. Radcliffe: Well, thank you for catching me up to speed. The future looks bright with lots of great options coming from Iantrek. Thanks for sharing!
Dr. Ianchulev: Thank you for having me.