During my residency, I was able to witness how anti-VEGFs changed the outcomes of our patients with retinal vascular diseases. Before their advent, most of our patients lost vision from neovascular AMD (nAMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR) and retinal vein occlusion due to a lack of treatment options. Once anti-VEGFs received FDA approval and became the standard of care more than 15 years ago, they caused a paradigm shift in retinal disease management by stabilizing and/or improving vision outcomes for our patients.

THE NEXT GENERATION OF THERAPIES

Even though anti-VEGFs have revolutionized the treatment of retinal diseases, patients have a significant treatment burden due to the need for repeated injections and clinic visits. In addition, a gap remained with regard to options for improving vision outcomes for our patients already being treated with anti-VEGFs.

Over the last decade, the goal has been to address treatment burden and improve vision outcomes by having new drug delivery platforms, longer acting molecules, molecules with new mechanism of action and gene therapy. As a field, we also continue to look for topical as well as oral treatments for retinal diseases to reduce treatment burden.

In addition to retinal vascular diseases, geographic atrophy (GA) from AMD remains a common cause of vision loss in our patients. This year has already been very promising with the approval of pegcetacoplan (Syfovre, Apellis) as well as impending approval of avacincaptad pegol (Iveric Bio) later this year to help our patients with GA.

IN THIS ISSUE

I am very excited to be the guest editor of this retina issue of Ophthalmology Management, in which we have covered these hot topics. With regard to GA, Drs. Elizabeth Yeu and Margaret Chang share their perspectives on diagnosing and monitoring progression and visual function in these patients, while Hannah Khan, Aamir Aziz, Dr. David Lally and Dr. Carl Danzig explore the GA treatment pipeline.

Other articles on the latest therapies in retinal disease include an update on nAMD treatments from Drs. Narine Viruni and Kapil Mishra, the DR treatment pipeline from Drs. Peter Kaiser and Caroline Awh and an exploration of gene therapy from Drs. Yuxi Zheng and Lejla Vajzovic. We also share an update on current and future applications for artificial intelligence in DR from Drs. Karen Matar, Yavuz Cakir and Justis Ehlers.

I want to thank all the authors for their contributions and for sharing data and updates on all the latest innovations in retinal diseases.

ALL THINGS RETINA

Innovation in the retina space is happening at a very fast pace, and it’s important to stay up to date on all the currently available treatment options for our patients as well as those coming down the pipeline in the future.

I hope you will find this issue beneficial to get you up to speed on everything in retina. OM

Arshad M. Khanani, MD, MA, FASRS, is a managing partner, director of clinical research, and director of fellowship at Sierra Eye Associates in Reno, Nev., and clinical associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.