ARVO 2024: Impact of switching when using an aflibercept biosimilar

At this year's ARVO meeting, SriniVas R Sadda, MD, presented "Post Hoc Analysis of a Phase 3 Trial on SB15 (Proposed Aflibercept Biosimilar): Assessment on Pre-to-Post Switching Efficacy and Safety in Neovascular Age-related Macular Degeneration."

Video Transcript:

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

SriniVas R Sadda, MD:

Hi, I'm Vas Sadda, professor of ophthalmology at UCLA and at the Doheny Eye Institute. I'm here at ARVO 2024. And I was able to give a presentation here, paper presentation, on what is the impact of switching when using an aflibercept biosimilar. Biosimilars are a big deal now because they potentially could provide a more affordable way of providing anti-VEGF therapy for patients, and we have many patients on anti-VEGF therapy already. And we have a couple of approved biosimilars on the market for, at least for ranibizumab. And the question was, "Is it okay to take in a patient who on existing therapy and switch them to a biosimilar once it's available?" And that's what we evaluated in this study of SB15, and the aflibercept, which is an aflibercept biosimilar in this trial. What we show them, what we demonstrated was that you can switch and still have exactly the same visual outcomes, anatomic outcomes for patients. So that I think gives us good evidence and confidence to do this in clinical practice. Now, I do also want to just take a brief moment to highlight some of the other work we've been doing. I've been very fortunate working at the Doheny Eye Institute to have a very big research group and a number of wonderful collaborators. And we have a whole host of different posters and presentations and paper presentation that we've been giving here at ARVO highlighting from a number of different areas. I want to highlight in particular, 1 example of some new work, I think, what I think is very groundbreaking work in the development of adaptive optics based fluorescence lifetime imaging ophthalmoscopy. This is work that is being led by my colleague, Yuhua Zhang, we've collaborated on this, and it actually is able to give us imaging of essentially the molecular or metabolic level, at least of individual RP cells in the eye, which I think is going to be pretty spectacular in this new era of molecular type therapeutics. I've also done a lot of work and presenting here on AI-based algorithms for analyzing a variety of different imaging studies in ophthalmology, as well as a whole host of work related to new biomarkers that we've identified in the context of AMD. So it's been a great meeting, and I'm really looking forward to the next ARVO after this.