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At the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) annual meeting, new research was presented that evaluated treatment patterns and outcomes among patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) treated with faricimab (Vabysmo).

Sophie Bakri, MD, chair of the department of ophthalmology of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, explains the results from -- and limitations of -- the study.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

We did a study using the Academy's . And this was a real-world study because we obviously have data on Vabysmo for macular degeneration from the trials. But really the question is how are things going in the real world, and how are physicians using it, and what are patient outcomes?

So we included patients with a documented diagnosis of AMD. They had one or more faricimab injections from February 2022 to June 2023, 6 months or greater of follow-up, and two or greater best documented visual acuity measures, either on or after the first faricimab injection. And so then we looked at the intervals that they were on and we called that an interval extension analysis. And these were patients who could go greater than 6 weeks between injections. And we did that analysis in patients who'd had four or greater faricimab injections.

We had a total of nearly 28,000 eyes and 93% of those had been previously treated, most of them, two-thirds of them, with aflibercept [Eylea]. And when it came to extension, we found that more than 50% of the neovascular AMD eyes achieved an extended faricimab interval -- and that was 6 weeks or greater -- within two initial injections of faricimab. And we found that in terms of visual acuity in previously treated eyes, it remained stable with the faricimab injections and in treatment-naive eyes, it increased after the faricimab injections. We also had a subgroup of patients who had OCTs [optical coherence tomography] and the central subfoveal thickness decreased within 3 to 6 months of faricimab treatment, regardless of whether they were treatment-naive or previously treated eyes.

I think the first thing that we have to think about is that a real-world study is just designed to capture what actually happens in routine practice. So it's not prospective, we don't standardize the way we check visual acuity or the way we do OCTs. We don't standardize the way that physicians choose to dose the drug. So definitely those are limitations. But in addition, the FA [fluorescein angiography] retina studies reflect our early use of faricimab. And as we learn more about the drug and more about treatment patterns, that may be different in the future.

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