AAO 2023: Real-world outcomes for faricimab for AMD

Sophie Bakri, MD, spoke with the Ophthalmology Times team about her presentation at this year's American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting titled, "Real world outcomes and treatment patterns with faricimab and AMD FA retina."

Video Transcript

Editor's note - This transcript has been edited for clarity.

David Hutton:

I'm David Hutton of Ophthalmology times. The American Academy of Ophthalmology recently held its annual meeting in San Francisco. Dr. Sophie Bakri was one of the esteemed presenters at the event. Her presentation was titled, "Real world outcomes and treatment patterns with faricimab and AMD FA retina." Thanks for joining me today. Tell us about your presentation.

Sophie Bakri, MD:

We've been using faricimab now in the United States since it was FDA approved in January 2022. And the purpose of a real-world study is to learn about practice patterns and patient outcomes. The FA retina study in AMD, utilized the IRIS registry to extract data from, and we included patients with a documented diagnosis of AMD, who had received 1 or more faricimab injections from February 2022 to June 2023. They had to have 6 months or greater of follow up, and 2 or more best documented visual acuity measures either on or after the first faricimab injection.

So we then looked at interval extension, and we define that as the number of patients that we could get to greater than 6 weeks between injections. And for that we looked at patients with 4 or more faricimab injections. So, we had a total of 28,000 patients, 93% of which had been previously treated, and [of] those previously treated two thirds had been treated with aflibercept. And, what we found was that more than 50% of the neovascular AMD eyes achieved an extended faricimab interval, which was greater than 6 weeks within 2 initial injections of faricimab. Now in terms of vision, the previously treated eyes remained stable in terms of vision, the treatment naive eyes, had vision increases over each injection. And in terms of fluid, it decreased on OCT in all groups at 3 and at 6 months.

So the good news is that in this study, there were no additional safety events identified and the rate of endophthalmitis was 0.05%. So I think this study highlights several things tells us that when you're treating patients with faricimab vision remains stable in previously treated eyes, increased in treatment-naive eyes, but the central subfoveal thickness decreased in all eyes. And the good news is that over 50% of eyes were extended to greater than 6 weeks after a couple of injections.