Calling it wonderful news, researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said Avastin, a much less expensive cancer drug seemed to work well in treating macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in people aged 50 and above.

The UW-Madison centre of the national clinical trial led by Dr. Suresh Chandra, Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, released first year results Thursday.  The UW School of Medicine and Public Health treated 26 of the 1,208 patients who participated in the trial.

Lucentis, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drug for treating AMD, was compared with cancer drug Avastin, which is also commonly used off-label in the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), by the National Eye Institute study.

The Comparison of AMD Treatments Trials (CATT) found the effectiveness of the two drugs to be similar.  However, the prices of the two drugs are not similar, while Avastin costs around $50 a dose, Lucentis costs around $2,000.

Dr. Chandra, a retina specialist, finds it wonderful that this could mean billions of dollars in savings for the Medicare programme, including having important implications for developing countries, where patients find Lucentis to be unaffordable.
The study was published online in the New England Journal of Medicine Sunday.

Around 250,000 patients are treated for AMD every year by the National Eye Institute (NEI), a part of the National Institutes of Health.  AMD is the leading cause of vision loss in older Americans, and when advanced, the wet form of AMD spurs the growth of abnormal blood vessels that leak fluid and blood into the macula, the central part of the retina that allows us to look straight ahead and perceive fine visual detail, thus obscuring vision.

AMD by causing central vision loss take away the mobility and independence of patients’, as they are no longer able to drive, read, recognise faces or perform tasks requiring hand and eye coordination.

The researchers will continue to follow patients through a second year of treatment to study longer-term effects of the drugs on vision and safety.