(Updated August 26, 2020)
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 27, 2009 — NeoVista, Inc. made public at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting the company’s interim study results from the preliminary study MERITAGE-I. The study was designed to examine the company’s novel epimacular brachytherapy procedure when used in patients that require chronic anti-VEGF treatment for wet AMD. Brachytherapy involves radiation treatment delivered by a small plaque sewn to the sclera (the white covering of the eyeball).
The study enrolled patients that had as many as 23 injections of anti-VEGF therapy before receiving epimacular brachytherapy. All patients that entered the study were required to have received a minimum of 8 injections in the past 12 months or 6 injections in the past 6 months preceding enrollment.
Preliminary study results (n=16) suggest that a single procedure of epimacular brachytherapy can further improve visual acuity in a majority of this patient population while decreasing the number of injections required based on Optical Coherence Tomography imaging after the brachytherapy procedure. Most importantly, 63% of patients enrolled in the study experienced improvement in their visual acuity while 50% of patients gained 5 or more letters of visual acuity at 6 months.
UPDATE:
The Macular Epiretinal Brachytherapy vs Ranibizumab (Lucentis) Only Treatment (MERLOT) pivotal device trial was conducted between November 10, 2009, and January 30, 2012 at 24 National Health Service hospitals across the UK. The MERLOT trial found that despite the acceptable safety of EMB, it did not reduce the number of ranibizumab injections and was associated with worse visual acuity than anti-VEGF treatment alone. These results do not support EMB use as an adjunct treatment for chronic, active neovascular ARMD. For more information, see ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01006538