A government-sponsored study released yesterday compared Lucentis, a drug approved to treat a common form of blindness in the elderly called macular degeneration, to Avastin, a cancer drug eye doctors have been using to treat the eye disease for years.
It found that patients who got Avastin could read an average of 8 more letters on an eye chart after a year – while Lucentis patients were able to read 8.5 more letters after a year of treatment.
”Health care providers and payers worldwide will now have to justify the cost of using ranibizumab [Lucentis,]” said an editorial accompanying the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
