VIDEO: Treatment options for patients with wet AMD

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify hliptak@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

What's become, you know, the mainstay of therapy for most of our patients are the anti-VEGF drugs. And, you know, in terms of the non-branded or off-label treatments, the anti-VEGF drug Avastin, or bevacizumab, is really sort of one of the main therapies that clinicians do offer their patients. Again, this is an off-label treatment, but it's been around, and it has been compared to some of the branded drugs and shown similar efficacy. So there's definitely a cost differential with that drug versus the branded drug. So that does come up quite a bit. When you get to branded drugs, you know, basically, the main drugs that we talk about these days are Lucentis and Eylea, and those are the main drugs that we use, and those are the branded drugs and the drugs that the FDA has given approval for wet macular degeneration and tend to be the mainstay of drugs. There are older drugs, things like Macugen, that just aren't used as much because, really, Eylea and Lucentis dominate our therapies these days. But all those drugs, as I mentioned, are given, you know, as monthly or, you know, maybe every other month type of therapies. You know, FDA labeling for a drug like Eylea is, again, that monthly dosing times three and then every eight week dosing. But a lot of us do end up using these drugs with a great degree of flexibility because patients' response to the drugs can be quite variable. And so we want to optimize patient, you know, visual outcomes while minimize treatment burden. And we do that by watching, as I mentioned before, by monitoring our patients, the response that they have, and really then titrating our dosages based on how they respond to treatment.