New data on Lucentis

Sunday, May 26 2013 | 00 h 00 min | News

Novartis, a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company, recently released new data to support the effectiveness and safety of its flagship ophthalmological drug, Lucentis.

At the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) annual meeting, recently held in Vienna, Austria, Novartis presented the results from the REPAIR study, conducted over a year on British patients. They show that with an average of 9.7 injections of Lucentis over a five-year period, blindness attributable to AMD could be reduced by 59%.

The study also found that visual acuity improved in patients with myopic choroidal neovascularization, with an average of 3.6 injections.

Moreover, data from 22 studies support the evidence that the drug is safe, which still needs to be confirmed by a five-year, global study involving 30,000 patients.

In 2012, Novartis achieved net sales of $2.4 billion with Lucentis, and Roche, which distributes it in the United States, recorded earnings of $1.56 billion.

Source: http://www.bilan.ch/awp/novartis-presente-de-nouvelles-donnees-sur-lefficacite-du-lucentis-7