Retina Society 2024: 12-month outcomes of FARETINA and FARWIDE studies

Durga Borkar, MD, sat down with Sydney Crago of Modern Retina to discuss one of her presentations on the 12-month outcomes of the FARETINA and FARWIDE studies from the Retina Society meeting being held this year in Lisbon, Portugal.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Sydney Crago:

I'm Sydney Crago with Modern Retina, and I'm here today with Dr Durga Borkar to talk a little bit about her presentations at the upcoming Retina Society meeting. Dr Borkar, I understand you'll be presenting on 2 topics at this year's Retina Society meeting. Can you tell me a little bit about these?

Durga Borkar, MD:

Sure! The first presentation we'll be doing is on 12-month outcomes of the FARETINA and FARWIDE studies, which are real-world studies evaluating the efficacy, durability, and safety of faricimab in the real world, and then, I'll also be presenting the first time phase 2 clinical trial results for ONL-1204 for rhegmatogenous retinal detachment.

Sydney Crago:

So turning over to the first one with the FARETINA study. Can you tell me a little bit about how this data was gathered?

Durga Borkar, MD:

Sure. So, this is a real-world study, there were 2 of them actually. One was done in the US and one in the UK. FARETINA is a US-based study, and that data is from the IRIS registry, which is the world's largest ophthalmology electronic health record registry. And so this study was done as a collaboration between Genentech and Verana Health. And for FARWIDE, this is a UK-based study. So these were sites from the NHS, and the data is also collected in the metasoft EHR.

Sydney Crago:

What does this data tell us about these real-world cases?

Durga Borkar, MD:

So, both of these studies have been going on for some time, since faricimab first became FDA approved in early 2022, and so what the goal of the presentation at Retina Society is is to show really how the data set has matured and to show some 12-month outcomes. And in this presentation, we'll be focusing on treatment-naive patients. The analysis is a little bit cleaner, a little bit easier for us to compare to some of the clinical trial results, and what we see here is that faricimab works incredibly well in diabetic macular edema in treatment-naive patients. Patients gained about 3 letters of vision in the FARETINA study at 1 year or 6 injections and 8 letters of visual acuity in the FARWIDE study, which again, was the UK-based study. And when we look at the safety, you know, it's very comparable to the phase 3 clinical trials, which is great. And of course, the durability as well, we see that patients really have decreased treatment burden, particularly in the second half of the 12-month follow-up period with faricimab.

Sydney Crago:

How can retina specialists who are treating DME patients, kind of, incorporate these learnings into their practice?

Durga Borkar, MD:

That's a good question. I think, in the past, when we've shown the FARETINA and FARWIDE results, we've really showed you know that a predominance of patients currently in the real-world are previously treated, so they are typically aflibercept 2 milligram switchers, and those patients do really well, as well. But in this analysis, we really focused on the treatment-naive patients, and the results are quite impressive, and so I think you know, one of the learnings from this is to consider faricimab earlier in the DME treatment paradigm, just because it does work really well, and it does potentially decrease treatment burden for patients.