CLEVELAND, April 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — A new study
published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine
(NEJM) shows bevacizumab (Avastin) is as effective as
ranibizumab (Lucentis), the current Food and Drug
Administration-approved drug for treating age-related macular
degeneration (AMD).
The results are from the landmark “Comparison of AMD Treatments
Trials” (CATT) study, a pioneering comparative effectiveness trial
made possible through funding by the National Eye Institute.
“For years, ophthalmologists have been using intravitreal
bevacizumab to treat neovascular AMD without data regarding
efficacy and safety from well-controlled studies,” said Daniel F.
Martin, M.D., study chair for CATT and chairman of the Cole Eye
Institute at Cleveland Clinic. “Patients and clinicians can now
feel confident that bevacizumab is therapeutically equivalent to
ranibizumab.”
Derived from the same protein as bevacizumab – a
well-known anti-cancer drug – ranibizumab was developed to block
blood vessel growth in AMD patients. In 2005, two
Genentech-sponsored clinical trials established ranibizumab as
highly effective for the treatment of wet AMD. During the year
between the announcement of the trial results and the release of
ranibizumab, ophthalmologists began injecting AMD patients with low
doses of bevacizumab due to its similarity to ranibizumab and its
availability. One dose of ranibizumab costs approximately
$2,000, while bevacizumab costs about $50 per dose. Both drugs
are manufactured by Genentech.
Comparative effectiveness trials like (CATT) are necessary to
the practice of evidence-based medicine, providing rigorous
evaluation of the impact of different options that are available
for treating a given medical condition for a particular set of
patients.
Although funded with $1.1 billion through the 2009 American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there remains insufficient
infrastructure f
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