The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Patricio G. Schlottmann, MD: Hi, everybody. We’re here in Ushuaia, Argentina, at the very end of the world with Peter K. Kaiser, MD, FASRS, who is participating in our national retina meeting. Peter, how has your experience been so far?
Peter K. Kaiser, MD, FASRS: Well, I have to say, this is my second time in Ushuaia. The first time was going to Antarctica. I love coming to Argentina because the people here are incredibly generous. They’re a wonderfully warm people. And more importantly, for a meeting like this, incredibly bright and incredibly engaged in learning everything there is to know about retina. So I really enjoy coming to this meeting.
Patricio G. Schlottmann, MD: Thank you. We’re very thankful that you came all the way down to this region, with so many flights. We are recruiting now for the HELIOS-3 study, in which we’re using OTX-TKI (Axpaxli; Ocular Therapeutix) to manage patients with diabetic retinopathy (DR). This is a condition that has no reasonable treatment available. What can you tell us about why this is very important for this particular population?
Dr. Kaiser: If you look at diabetic retinopathy, we have FDA-approved treatments, and treatments that are approved here in Argentina, but most of us don't use them except in a situation where you have diabetic macular edema (DME). We hope to change this with OTX-TKI. In our earlier studies, we used one injection and followed patients for a year. And over that year, every patient in a clinical study either were the same or improved in their diabetic retinopathy. And in the patients who received sham, 40% developed vision-threatening complications—proliferative DR, center-involved DME—whereas none of the patients in the OTX-TKI arm did. So we’re hoping to look at that once again.
In the HELIOS-3 study, we’re doing almost the same type of study design—injection at baseline and then at 48 weeks and follow the patients vs sham for the development of complications, for the improvement hopefully, as well to prevent the worsening of retinopathy.
You and I see patients all day long, and you certainly see more in the diabetes space. These patients will be okay with injection once a year. It’s the frequent anti-VEGF injections that they’re not okay with, and maybe we can change the paradigm and improve outcomes.
Dr. Schlottmann: That would be very good for our patients. That would be very good for the long-term of all diabetic patients. We're doing our best with all the many patients that we have here to recruit as well as we did for many of the other studies. So thank you very much for coming down here and thank you very much for trusting us with recruiting patients to your studies.
Dr. Kaiser: My pleasure. RP
