New research presented at the recent American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) annual meeting evaluated early treatment patterns and outcomes among patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) treated with faricimab (Vabysmo).

In this MedPage Today video, presenting author Theodore Leng, MD, of the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University in California, explains the results from FARETINA-AMD and its clinical significance.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

We looked at the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s IRIS Registry, which is the largest specialty-specific dataset in the world with over 75 million patients in it. And the question we had was, what is the real-world experience like with Faricimab in neovascular AMD?

As we all know, faricimab was approved in January of 2022, and so we looked at the IRIS registry for the first 9 months of the drug’s release, looking at both treatment-naive and patients that were previously treated with anti-VEGF [vascular endothelial growth factor] who had neovascular AMD. There have been about 20,000 plus patients treated with faricimab in the first 9 months since its launch in the IRIS registry, which has about 70% coverage of all Eye-care visits, both retina and non-retina, in the United States.

What we found was 17,503 eyes which received faricimab in those first 9 months. Six percent of those patients were treatment-naive, and 94% switched from a different anti-VEGF agent or multiple agents, which was to be expected as with any new anti-VEGF launch in the U.S. We found that 67% of patients switched from aflibercept [Eylea] with a mean injection interval, about 6 weeks between shots at the time of switching. For those eyes that had at least two injections and at least 4 months of follow-up, we found that over 50% of eyes were able to achieve an extended injection interval of over 6 weeks after the first two injections of faricimab. And those were 55% of previously treated eyes and 43% of treatment-naive eyes were able to extend. That was the first interesting finding.

The second interesting finding was in those treatment naive eyes, in that the vision improved in those eyes after those four injections. And the last main point and interesting finding was that a lot of patients started with good vision. In fact, 49% of eyes started with 20/40 or better vision in our cohort, and this was much higher than in the phase III trials, TENAYA and LUCERNE, where only 14% of eyes had 20/32 or better vision at the time of initiation.

And I think this speaks to the fact that clinicians like myself that are treating retinal patients every day feel very comfortable with this agent and the mechanism of action and the safety profile that we’ve seen to date. So in summary, the study is called FARETINA-AMD. It’s the largest ongoing real world study of faricimab and additional analysis are planned and will be presented a future meeting as well.