Breakthrough Treatment for AMD Related Blindness
Michael Bennett, M.D., Honolulu retinal surgeon, is able to offer the first real hope to his patients who face blindness from age-related macular degeneration.
(PRWEB) March 30, 2005 -- Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the
primary cause of irreversible vision loss in people over 65. As the baby boom
generation balloons that age bracket, a million Americans are expected to
develop AMD over the next five years.
Until last month, the best eye
specialists could do for patients was to treat the symptoms or results of the
disease with lasers and drug therapies. Now, using newly FDA-approved formulas,
Dr. Bennett and other retinal specialists can target the cause of wet AMD and
block its development.
“This treatment fills a major unmet medical need,”
Bennett said. “A half a million people in the developed world are blinded by
macular degeneration every year. It’s easy to understand why some of our
patients can get excited about the potential of the new treatment.”
FDA
fast tracked approval because of superior early results, and the treatment was
approved in six months.
“Wet AMD represents only 10 percent of the AMD we
see,” Dr. Bennett said, “but it’s responsible for 90 percent of the vision loss
in these patients.” You can see why this is a significant
breakthrough.
The drug will not be generally available to physicians
until next week, but Dr. Bennett, a pioneer in retinal treatments and equipment
breakthroughs, is among a handful of doctors nationwide that got early release
of it.
Macugen, the first of this new series of drug therapies to be
approved, is a pegaptanib sodium injection. It is proven to slow vision loss in
those with the wet AMD.
“You can’t begin to imagine the hope this
provides to patients facing blindness because of this disease. Wet AMD causes
the body to grow new blood vessels that aren’t needed and which contribute to
blindness,” Bennett said. Retinal surgeons use lasers to destroy the blood
vessels after they’ve formed.
“This drug therapy allows us to inhibit
the new blood vessels from forming, and seals them up to stop or prevent
leaking,” which contributes to the vision loss.
Macugen works by binding
itself to a protein that is involved in the formation of the unwanted new blood
vessels and leakage and thus inhibits them.
The clinical studies have
been impressive. Consider the lines of an eye chart. Patients suffering from
this disease lose the ability to see letter after letter, line after line.
Within six weeks of beginning the therapy in clinical trials patients
experienced a reduced risk of vision loss.
“Results show patients hold
their own, that is, stay the same on the vision chart, and actually some get
letters back. This was an extremely rare occurrence before this
therapy.”
The treatment is expensive, Dr. Bennett said, but Medicare is
expected to cover the new therapy.
There are 15 million in the United
States that suffer from some form of AMD, and more than 1.2 million are
experiencing active blood vessel growth and leakage associated with the wet AMD.
For information on the FDA approval:
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/2004/new01146.html
For
technical information from the therapy provider:
www.pfizer.com
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/3/prweb223046.htm