Noninfectious Uveitis

Patients with macular edema secondary to noninfectious uveitis who were treated with suprachoroidally injected triamcinolone acetonide gained significantly more vision when compared with a sham-treated cohort.

EyePoint Pharmaceuticals has reorganized its operations and will downsize its workforce in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a press release.

Complex, multifactorial and associated with at least 40 different disorders, uveitis is the fifth leading cause of blindness worldwide. With an estimated 30,000 new cases each year, it is responsible for about 10% to 15% of all cases of legal blindness in the United States.

The cover story in this issue of Ocular Surgery News focuses on noninfectious uveitis and new treatments that help control inflammation. Some of them, like Yutiq from EyePoint Pharmaceuticals and Ozurdex from Allergan, deliver anti-inflammatories inside the eye — an appealing approach because of the slow release of drug and the elimination of compliance issues. But of course, eye drops are used to treat most conditions in our specialty, and we know patients consistently fail to take them well. This is a bigger problem than most of us would like to acknowledge, yet few of us make the effort to educate patients on how to take drops. We would all be better doctors if we did.

Eyes treated with Yutiq experienced lower recurrence rates of noninfectious uveitis than sham-treated eyes in a 36-month phase 3 trial, EyePoint Pharmaceuticals announced in a press release.

Eyevensys, a Paris-based biotechnology company, has closed a round of $30 million in Series B financing intended for development of EYS606 for the treatment of chronic noninfectious uveitis, according to a press release.

Switching to a biosimilar would be a “feasible treatment choice,” and is associated with maintaining clinical efficacy in patients with noninfectious uveitis who previously received the reference biologic, according to data published in Frontiers in Pharmacology.

Switching to a biosimilar would be a “feasible treatment choice,” and is associated with maintaining clinical efficacy in patients with noninfectious uveitis who previously received the reference biologic, according to data published in Frontiers in Pharmacology.

SAN FRANCISCO — Using a composite endpoint scoring system, intravenous Actemra showed efficacy in noninfectious uveitis, according to research from the STOP-Uveitis study presented at the American Academy of Ophthalmology annual meeting. Muhammad Hassan, MD, from Byers Eye Institute, Spencer Center for Vision Research, Stanford University, and colleagues randomly assigned patients with noninfectious uveitis to receive 4 mg/kg (G1) or 8 mg/kg (G2) of IV tocilizumab every 4 weeks for 6 months to determine the efficacy of IV Actemra (tocilizumab, Genentech) using a composite endpoint scoring system.