Lucentis is approved to treat wet age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in the elderly.
At the #1 ranked top employer, Regeneron, the drive to bring new approaches to drug discovery present since the company's founding in 1988—has ripened into three marketed products, including the recently approved Eylea for wet, age-related macular degeneration and Zaltrap for metastatic colorectal cancer.
The FDA approved ranibizumab for wet AMD in June 2006.
Intravitreal ranibizumab injection, an antiangiogenic treatment, is the approved treatment for wet AMD in the UK 4 and has been very successful.
The new treatment is approved for types of wet macular degeneration that account for only about 25percentt of total cases.
Although regulators haven't authorized Avastin's use against eye disease, it is chemically similar to Lucentis, which was approved last year to treat wet macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the elderly.
Lucentis, approved in June for wet AMD, is essentially a fragment of the monoclonal antibody that was used to make the company's colon cancer drug Avastin.
In ophthalmology, currently two VEGF-antagonistic drugs are approved for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration (wet AMD) worldwide: ranibizumab, a Fab antibody fragment binding the most relevant splice variants of VEGF-A [ 8, 9], and pegaptanib, a PEGylated aptamer that binds the heparin-binding domain of VEGF-A [ 10].
Ranibizumab (Lucentis; Genentech, San Francisco, California, USA) is US Food Drug and Administration US FDAapprovedved for the treatment of wet AMD, macular oedema associated with retinal vein occlusions and diabetic macular oedema.
Visudyne is approved for the treatment of wet macular degeneration in clinical settings and is being tested as ntPDT for cancer in preclinical studies [ 43].
