New intravitreal injection Vabysmo (Faricimab) available at Terrace Eye Centre.

There is exciting news for patients requiring intravitreal injections for macular degeneration and diabetic macular oedema. The Australian Therapeutic Goods administration has approved a new medicine which will potentially allow for longer intervals between injections.

Vabysmo® has been thoroughly tested overseas in four global, randomised, multi-centre, double-masked, active comparator-controlled, Phase III, two-year clinical studies named TENAYA, LUCERNE, YOSEMITE and RHINE.

Terrace Eye Centre has started seeing some of the one month results of the new intravitreal injection Vabysmo (Faricimab). Vabysmo is a new type of molecule, the first bispecific antibody approved for both wet macular degeneration and diabetic macular oedema. Vabysmo blocks the activity of angiopoietin-2 (Ang-2), as well as, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Vabysmo treatment begins with an induction course of four initial 4-weekly eye injections. Once the macula is dry, the frequency of injections may be extended up to every four months. For many people with wet macular degeneration, very active disease can mean ongoing monthly injections for many years. While this is certainly worth it to save vision and much better than the almost inevitable legal blindness of decades past, the monthly visits can be a burden. For people used to having persistent fluid with four weekly injections, to see the macula dry after only one injection of this new molecule is very exciting. It is very early days but these results are very promising and exciting.

The visual prognosis for people with wet macular degeneration and diabetic macular oedema has improved dramatically over the past decade and continues to improve. As always, early detection and treatment is essential and the use of Amsler grids to look for early signs of visual distortion is extremely beneficial.

We already have a lot of patients successfully using the treat and extend strategy to maintain their vision at two or three monthly intervals, but for those people currently requiring four weekly injections, this exciting new treatment offers some hope.