The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi, I'm Josh Wallsh, MD. I’m here at the American Society of Retina Specialists in Montreal wanting to talk about my presentation comparing avacincaptad pegol (Izervay; Astellas) to pegcetacoplan (Syfovre; Apellis) in same-eye treatment.

Basically, my research was looking at patients who were treated with avacincaptad pegol, then transitioned to pegcetacoplan. So all these eyes were treated with both products. Due to insurance issues, their treatment had to switch midstream and both treatments were performed for about a year.

What we ended up seeing was that treatment efficacy—looking specifically at geographic atrophy (GA) lesion growth rate in square root transformed data—was significantly decreased when treating with both products compared to pretreatment levels. More importantly, comparing both products, there was not a statistically significant difference in the treatment efficacy. So during the avacincaptad pegol group, there was a 0.18 growth rate, compared to 0.21 for the pegcetacoplan treatment. Again, not statistically significant.

[This is an] important point to look at because we don’t have good comparative data. There's really only been 1 or 2 studies looking at this information. So it was important for us to continue to expand the database and know if the treatment efficacy is similar or different between the 2 products. And ultimately my research and the evidence from my research supports that the 2 products are comparable in their effectiveness at slowing GA growth rate. And we can use other markers, such as safety or treatment burden, to help determine our treatment decision between the 2 products.

Thank you. RP