VIDEO: Minorities under-represented in DME

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What we’ve learned consistently is that Black Americans and Hispanics have consistently worse outcomes relative to their white counterparts. And you know, actually this was sort of really interesting. This was first brought to my attention after reading the Latino eye disease study. And then actually, you know, we work at a city hospital in New York called Bellevue Hospital, and we were doing a research project of our own, and we were actually looking at biomarkers, things that we can see on OCT that may prognosticate, you know, good or poor outcomes in response to treatment. And really what we identified is one of the major reasons for why patients were doing poorly. One of the strongest predictive factors was whether or not they were Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic, and I think that was really surprising to us because if we sort of make sure that everything is all equal, you know, their baseline vision, their anatomy, we sort of normalize based on sort of biomarkers, being Hispanic still had a worse outcome. I think these things are things that we don’t understand. Clinical trials predominantly enroll white individuals, and now there’s a study that’s looking at underrepresented minorities in the Elevatum study, in a study looking at faricimab utilization. So, that will be the first strong level evidence study that we’re using looking at a predominantly underrepresented group.