EyeWorld is the official news magazine of the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery.
Issue link: https://digital.eyeworld.org/i/227001
52 EW MEETING REPORTER Reporting live from the 2013 American Academy of Ophthalmology Annual Meeting in New Orleans December 2013 Reporting live from the 2013 American Academy of Ophthalmology Annual Meeting Thursday, November 14 5th annual Ophthalmology Innovation Summit OIS@AAO 2013 held its daylong program of presentations from industry, government officials, and others, covering a wide range of topics in the ophthalmic space. The meeting, held ahead of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) meeting, had a record attendance of 800 participants. Ophthalmic industry has promising year The past year has been positive for the ophthalmic industry, with the market growing as more pharmaceuticals and devices enter the space, said Emmett T. Cunningham, MD, partner at Clarus Ventures, San Francisco, and chairman of OIS. "On the drug side, there's been six original [new drug applications/biologic license applications] approved in this last full year," he said. Those new drug approvals include ThromboGenics' (Leuven, Belgium) JETREA (ocriplasmin) intravitreal injection 2.5 mg/mL, which was approved and launched in January. It now has a reimbursement code, and first half of the year sales were just under $20 million, he said. The first combination glaucoma drop without a beta blocker available in the U.S., SIMBRINZA, from Alcon (Fort Worth, Texas), also was approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "On the device side, [it was] also a very active year—74 [total] 510K approvals, which is more than twice the number that we had last year," Dr. Cunningham said. "We've had four original [premarket] approvals last year and importantly, we had the only FDA [humanitarian device exemption] approval, the Argus retinal prosthesis [Second Sight Medical Products, Sylmar, Calif.], which I think is a From left: ASCRS Executive Director Dave Karcher, Boris Malyugin, MD, Robert Cionni, MD, Nick Mamalis, MD, and Alan Crandall, MD, help kick off ASCRS' 40th anniversary celebration in the exhibit hall at AAO. real game changer. That's now launched worldwide and will launch in the U.S. in the second half of this year." Funding has stabilized across sectors, he said. Although venture funding has gone down in general, in ophthalmology, it is relatively stable. "There remains what I think is the central issue, at least from the venture perspective—and money is what drives us, we can't not say that—there's much more money being invested now in companies … than is being raised," said Dr. Cunningham. "That's going to create a bottleneck over time. We're going to have to see what that leads to." Friday, November 15 Cornea Day brings wealth of knowledge The Cornea Society held its Fall Educational Symposium on Friday, Nov. 15, 2013. Among the highlights was the induction of the society's first non-MD, non-American recipient of the R. Townley Paton Award, which was bestowed upon Naoshi Shinozaki, BS, for his work in introducing eye banking to the Japanese. Donor age makes no difference in graft survival rates Calling the Cornea Donor Study (CDS) "the most significant study in the history of our specialty," Mark Mannis, MD, Sacramento, Calif., said its 10-year results reiterated findings from the five-year outcomes—donor age is not a factor in graft survival in the majority of cases after penetrating keratoplasty for endothelial disorders. "In the first five years older donor tissue fared better, and there's a trend in the second five years that younger tissue fares better, but it's not statistically significant," he said. At the 10-year point, there was 21% graft failure rate (of 1,090 enrolled participants), 41% with clear grafts, 19% who died, and 18% with less than 10 years of follow-up. Grafts with a donor age of 66 years or older had a 69% success rate at 10 years, compared with a 74% success rate in donor tissue under 66 years old. "Donor tissue from 34–71-year-olds has a 75% success rate," he said. "The very old tissue and the very young tissue had diverse outcomes," with the younger tissue performing much better than the very old tissue. "Successful grafts