Cancer drug used to treat eye condition

A drug used to treat bowel cancer has been shown to be both safe and effective when used to help save the sight of people with the most common cause of sight loss, according to a new study.

Avastin is licensed as a treatment for bowel cancer in the UK, but is often used “off label” to treat age related macular degeneration (AMD).

AMD is an eye disease of the centre of the retina which causes the loss of central vision. This leaves the affected person with only peripheral, or side, vision.

Although it does not usually lead to total blindness, it is the most common form of sight loss in the developed world. Around half a million people in the UK alone are affected by AMD.

About one in 10 AMD patients develop the wet form of the disease which leads to rapid sight loss.

In the study published in today's British Medical Journal (BMJ), 131 patients with wet AMD were given either Avastin injections every six weeks or one of three treatments available on the NHS in 2006, when the research was done.

After one year, almost a third of the patients given Avastin gained 15 or more letters in eye chart tests compared with only 3 per cent in the standard treatment group.

And the proportion of patients who lost fewer than 15 letters was significantly greater among those receiving Avastin (91%) compared with 67 per cent in the standard treatment group.

The researchers added that Avastin treatment had a low rate of serious side effects, and cocluded that Avastin was "superior to standard care."

However, the study did not compare Avastin with the drug Lucentis, which is now used to treat wet AMD but was not available in 2006.

As Lucentis costs around £10,000 a year per eye, the results suggests that Avastin would be a much cheaper alternative in helping prevent wet AMD, particularly in countries which cannot afford to treat the condition.

Several large trials comparing the two drugs are now underway.

In an accompanying editorial in the BMJ, Professor Usha Chakravarthy from the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast says that, although the trial clearly shows that Avastin is better than previous standard treatments, it does not show whether the drug works as well as Lucentis.

And warns that “the off label use of bevacizumab (Avantis) should not be encouraged until the large randomised trials comparing it with ranibizumab (Lucentis) report their findings.”

This article was published on Fri 11 June 2010