ASRS 2025: Imaging study shows decreased leakage after treatment with axitinib hydrogel for diabetic retinopathy
Katherine Talcott, MD, recently gave a presentation at the American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) Annual Meeting about the use of fluorescein angiography to look at disease activity in diabetic retinopathy.
Katherine Talcott, MD:
My name is Katherine Talcott. I’m a faculty member at Cleveland Clinic at Cole Eye Institute, and I’m so happy to be able to tell you a little bit about the presentation that I’m going to give later today at ASRS.
This is a post-hoc analysis of the phase 1 Helios study. This was a study that looked at patients with moderately severe NPDR without diabetic macular edema and trying to look to see if OTX-TKI, which is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, was able to impact this diabetic retinopathy. While the overall study sort of looked at that, this was a post-hoc analysis really utilizing ultra-wide field fluorescein angiography to be able to look at leakage longitudinally in this patient. What we did is we used a machine learning-based algorithm to be able to identify areas of leakage on ultra-wide field fluorescein angiography in these patients to be able to calculate a leakage area as well as leakage index, which is the percentage of the retina that has leakage.
When we compared patients who had received the experimental therapy to those who had not, we found that patients who were treated in the sham group actually had an increase overall of total leakage area, both looking at the posterior portion of the retina and the peripheral area of the retina. But those who had the experimental treatment with OTX-TKI actually had a decrease in retinal leakage. That stayed the case when you look both at the peripheral retina and the posterior retina.
This is just sort of another way beyond the normal metrics that were used in the phase 1 study to be able to utilize fluorescein angiography to look at disease activity and diabetic retinopathy. While the study overall showed that there was an improvement in diabetic retinopathy severity score, as well as a decreased risk of having vision-threatening complications such as bleeding, this is just another marker that utilizing imaging can be able to show that this intervention was associated with decreased leakage and activity of their diabetic retinopathy. Thank you much for paying attention to this video and I hope you enjoyed this.
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