The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hi, my name is David Almeida, MD, MBA, PhD, and I am a vitreoretinal surgeon and clinician scientist at Erie Retina Research, and I am happy to share my presentation at ARVO this year, which was on Near-Real Surgical Specimens (NRSS) for the standardized assessment of suprachoroidal injections. The Near-Real surgical Specimen is something that we created and released in 2024. These are the first-ever biologically compatible, fresh, frozen tissue that are taken from cadavers, but then modeled into something that is reproducible for a surgical procedure or an actual surgery.
These cadaver models are called Near-Real Surgical Specimens because they're really the closest thing that exists to the real one. So, we kind of use this as a proof of concept to show something that could not have been shown before. So, what we did is we looked at suprachoroidal injections—something that we have a really hard time knowing exactly if we put it into the suprachoroidal space.
And what we found is that in our study, we compared our cadaver models, Near-Real Surgical Specimens, to your standard cadaver models. And what we found is that the Near-Real Surgical Specimens—because they are essentially human tissue—are both 3 times more reproducible, more accurate than the best cadaver model. I'll say that again, that's a 3X improvement. We see a variability of about 6% with Near-Real Surgical Specimens, and it's almost 20% with cadavers. This has very high implications for 2 really critical aspects:
1. Training—how we train principal investigators, researchers in clinical trials for therapeutics that haven't been approved yet with the Near-Real Surgical Specimens. I think that's a really critical insight.
2. Then, how do we take things that are new that have been approved and then train new retina specialists, new vitreoretinal surgeons to do it? So having the Near-Real Surgical Specimens allows us to have a model that's valid and can really mimic real life surgical practice and procedural at cost effectiveness.
We are excited about the Near-Real Surgical Specimen. We feel like the suprachoroidal space is just the beginning and there's really lots of avenues that we can now take it to. RP