VIDEO: Innovation, new therapeutics needed for ocular GVHD

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Despite all of the progress that we're making, it's unfortunate to mention that there are a couple of unmet needs in treating our patients, and I can sort of classify them in two ways. And the first is I think most physicians and patients are very eager in immune modulatory treatments, which don't suppress the immune system and are more sort of natural and are easy to basically tolerate. Certain examples include the current study that is administering patients potato starch, or raffinose, to modify the gut microbiome. It is a potato starch that you can buy in the grocery store. Something so simple — something that is widely available and does not suppress the immune system. So those are some of the therapies that patients are quite interested in. We are also doing a study of human milk oligosaccharides — once again, natural compounds that don't suppress the immune system and still provide a lot of beneficial immune modulation. Therapies like that currently, while they're in development, are definitely not standard of care, and that is one area where we are lacking.

Definitely in chronic graft-versus-host disease, I can think of one particular organ where if our patients develop it, it's quite debilitating, and it's ocular or eye graft-versus-host disease. In this day and age — in the era of laptops and video games and Zoom calls and smartphones — we are all so used to being on screens, and if we have ocular graft-versus-host disease, that is severely impacted, in addition to just overall quality of life. And while there are lots of topical therapies for it, none of them are definitively curative. In all of the trials that we look at in chronic graft-versus-host disease, unfortunately the ocular GVHD, that specific organ, there isn't a lot of innovation or new therapeutics, and I, unfortunately, see a lot of my patients where the graft-versus-host disease improves elsewhere, but not in the eyes. That is definitely a large unmet need.