by Dan Roberts
February 3, 2010
Investigators at Kaiser Permanente Southern California in Pasadena reported in the February 2010 issue of Ophthalmology that Avastin and Lucentis performed equally in recent testing.
In an indirect comparison of the two drugs, study author Dr. Donald Fong and coauthors reviewed the records of 452 patients treated for wet AMD with Avastin or Lucentis. They found that 22.9 percent of Avastin patients and 25.0 percent of Lucentis patients attained visual acuity better than or equal to 20/40 after a year of treatment. Similar numbers of patients in each group also showed some degree of vision improvement at 12 months.
The Kaiser Permanente study is one of several comparing the two drugs. The largest, and probably most definitive, study is the National Eye Institute’s ongoing Comparisons of Age-Related Macular Degeneration Treatments Trials (CATT), involving 44 centers across the U.S. Results from that research are expected in 2011.