Ranibizumab has potential to prevent blindness and visual impairment from age-related macular degeneration in non-Hispanic Caucasian patients, according to a computer-modeling study carried out by scientists at the Wilmer Eye Institute, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. They reported their findings in Archives of Ophthalmology.

Ranibizumab, developed by Genentech, is marketed by Genentech in the USA and in the rest of the world by Novartis under the brand name Lucentis. It is a monoclonal antibody fragment derived from the same parent mouse antibody as Avastin (bevacizumab). It inhibits the growth of new blood vessels (anti-angiogenic) and is FDA approved to treat wet type age-related macular degeneration.

The authors wrote as background information:

“Before ranibizumab became available in 2006, neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) was reported to be the leading cause of blindness in individuals 50 years and older in the United States and throughout many parts of the world.”

Neil M. Bressler, M.D. and team designed a modeling study using outcomes from Phase 3 ranibizumab trials to estimate how many Americans might benefit from ranibizumab treatment to treat neovascular AMD.

After gathering and analyzing data from the Beaver Dam Eye Study, as well as the US Census Bureau (2008), they predicted that 151,340 non-Hispanic Caucasian Americans would develop neovascular AMD in 2008.

They analyzed data from a phase 3 ranibizumab trial – Age-Related Eye Disease Study – and estimated that 51,000 of these people, about one third of them, would already have preexisting new blood vessel formation in the choroid, a thin vascular layer that supplies blood to the retina (choroidal neovascularization) in the opposite eye – those patients would not be eligible for the computer-modeling study.

They estimated that 103,582 out of the 151,340 patients would be eligible for inclusion in the study’s criteria.

The computer model predicted that if none of the 104,582 patients received monthly ranibizumab, 16% (16,268) of them would have become legally blind within 24 months.

Monthly ranibizumab was estimated to reduce legal blindness in 24 months to 4,484 (by 72%).

They also estimated that if none of the 103,582 patients received monthly ranibizumab, 34% of them would have gone on to develop visual impairment – defined as worse than 20/40 in the better eye, which in most US states would have meant they would not be able to drive. They estimated that visual impairment incidence would be reduced by 37% in two years with monthly ranibizumab usage.

The authors concluded that according to their computer-model results, monthly ranibizumab treatment would have a significant effect on blindness rates among patients with AMD.

Arch Ophthalmol. 2011;129[6]:709-717.

Written by Christian Nordqvist