The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello everyone. I’m Hasenin “Has” Al-Khersan, MD, here at ASRS in Montreal and I presented looking at geographic atrophy (GA) progression in patients before and after treatment with pegcetacoplan (Syfovre; Apellis), both patients with and without combined neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD).

So for the study, we looked at patients from Retina Consultants of America (RCA)’s routine clinical practice database and we applied RetinAI’s Discovery Platform to do artificial intelligence analysis of the photoreceptor and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layers. Our cohorts consisted of nearly 100 eyes of patients with just GA and almost 150 eyes of patients with both GA and nAMD.

What we found when we analyzed these patients is that they had very similar growth rates before they were treated with pegcetacoplan in terms of the progression of their RPE loss and their photoreceptor loss. However, what we see in the year after they were treated with pegcetacoplan is that there was a reduction in both photoreceptor loss and RPE loss in both cohorts. And very interestingly, the effect was numerically larger for the patients with combined disease.

What this tells us is that pegcetacoplan seems to be effective in reducing RPE loss and reducing photoreceptor loss, not only in patients with GA only, but also in patients with GA and neovascular disease.

Importantly, when we look at these patients, they had very similar baseline lesion characteristics in terms of the size of the areas of RPE loss and ellipsoid zone (EZ) loss. So we don’t believe that was the confounding factor. And they all received similar treatment intervals. They were injected with pegcetacoplan about every 6 weeks. And for those patients receiving anti-VEGF therapy, it was about every 6 to 7 weeks. So those important factors were similar between the 2 cohorts and unlikely to have influenced the outcome. RP