Good morning! End of July. How amazing! My elders always told me time flies as you get older. One more month of summer and that will be that.
Anyway, I have been ignoring my inbox. I need to get back to that. With four full days of clients and my “free” class homework and….sorry. In the news today or whenever this came…
As I suspected, the retina specialists discovered what was causing the inflammation after Eylea shots. It turns out that four lots of Eylea were responsible for 62% of the problems. The syringes included in the kits appear to have been somehow contaminated. Maybe. At this point, it is all speculative.
Lot numbers were made available to doctors at the end of February. All of these kits should be out of circulation at this time.
The take-home message for the consumer is this: report negative side effects. It may not be “just me”. You could be saving dozens of people from problems.
That was one tidbit from Healio. Another from Healio is they have fast-tracked APL-2.
As many of you know but some may not, fast-tracking is basically just making something a priority, rush job in FDA parlance. The FDA talks about facilitating the development and expediting the review of drugs that treat serious conditions and try to meet unmet needs. What fast track means in practical terms is the drug has a visitor’s pass that allows it to skip the line and get on the ride pretty much first.
Don’t you hate it when you are at the amusement park in line for what seems like hours in the hot sun and some clown waltzes up to the front…? Anyway, that is fast-tracking.
APL-2 is another pretender to the throne for the first, truly effective treatment for dry AMD. It is currently in the spotlight just like lampalizumab was until it failed in phase 3 trials. Hopefully, this complement factor inhibitor will have more success than lamp stuff.
And in case you are losing hope and don’t think any of the drug companies are truly interested in finding treatments for us, Healio gave cynical little me some reason to believe. Last year Novartis earned $2 billion during the second quarter. This year they earned $7.8 billion the second quarter. Novartis makes Lucentis. Sound familiar? How about ranibizumab? Same thing. The drug seems to be an up and comer in the treatment of wet AMD. A good portion of Novartis’ growth was due to ophthalmological treatments such as Lucentis.
Then there is Johnson and Johnson. That company is no longer just the band-aid people. Johnson and Johnson saw over a 10% growth in profits from second quarter 2017 to second quarter 2018. Johnson and Johnson makes contact lenses and eye surgery devices.
In short, there is gold in them there eyeballs! Considering there are roughly ten dry AMD patients for every wet one, how could any red-blooded capitalist resist? Dreams of riches beyond imagination!
And here you thought they did not care!
Written July 29th, 2018