Special Session

Lucentis vs Avastin for wet AMD. The CATT results in a European context

The Comparison of AMD Treatments Trials (CATT) is a multicenter randomized comparative effectiveness study sponsored by the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health. CATT was designed to address important questions about the treatment of neovascular AMD.

By June 2006, when the FDA approved Lucentis as a treatment for neovascular AMD,  off label intraocular Avastin already had become a widely used treatment in many countries. Important questions remained, however, about the comparative effectiveness of Lucentis v. Avastin as well as about the dosing strategy, that is, monthly dosing as required by the Genentech-sponsored trials v. prn dosing as widely practiced among retina specialists.

CATT enrolled 1208 patients with treatment naive neovascular AMD in 44 clinical centers. Patients were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: Lucentis monthly, Avastin monthly, Lucentis prn, or Avastin prn. One-year outcome data will be presented and implications for clinical practice will be discussed.

Authorship: Stuart L Fine, MD for the CATT Research Group

The session will include a discussion including the following panelists:

Usha Charavarthy, United Kingdom
Francesco Bandello, Italy
Susanne Binder, Austria

Moderator: Stefan Seregard, Sweden