FDA-approved treatments for AMD

Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 3:19 pm Post in Eye Diseases

Currently, there are several FDA-approved macular degeneration treatments, which can preserve or even improve remaining vision.

Approved in 2006, Lucentis aims to treat wet AMD, which is a form of the colorectal cancer treatment drug. Lucentis is monthly injected into the eye. Its clinical trial results have revealed that 95% of Lucentis received participants improved or stabilized their vision. 40% of Lucentis patients were reported to have a 20/40 vision. Lucentis achieves these effects by targeting VEGF protein, which promotes growth of abnormal blood vessels in retina and leads to AMD. However, Lucentis still has drawbacks. Even if no adverse reactions associated with the injection itself have been found, Lucentis treatment has some complications, such as eye inflammation, increased eye pressure, traumatic cataract and retinal detachment.

Another FDA-approved treatment for AMD is Macugen, which prevents the abnormal blood vessel growth caused by a protein. The newer treatment also performs in means of injection in every six weeks. Macugen also received satisfying clinical trial results that 33% of its patients maintained or improved their vision. And Macugen was proved to slow the incidence of AMD-caused vision loss. While bringing high rates (up to 40%) of slight side effects such as eye floaters and discomfort, Macugen only causes less than 1% of severe side effects such as detached retina and severe inflammation.

As the first drug therapy for AMD, Visudyne has a painless but more complex treatment procedure. After injected into the patient’s arm, Visudyne will be activated by a non-thermal laser light during its passing through the retinal blood vessels. Vision improvement has been found in one out of six Visudyne receivers and vision loss has been significantly reduced. However, Visudyne is only effective for people with new blood vessel growth, which account for 40% to 60% of total AMD patients.

As an ever widely used AMD treatment, laser treatment is particularly for AMD patients with extremely distinctive bleeding under the retina. Today, laser treatment has been replaced by Visudyne, because the laser procedure brings scars or blind spots on patients.