Product details

On 19 October, 2007, Herb Kohl, the Chairman of the US Senate''s Special Committee on Aging, asked Genentech to clarify its decision to limit the availability of its product Avastin in favour of its more expensive drug Lucentis, both applied in the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration. In 2007 age-related macular degeneration (AMD) was the leading cause of severe vision loss in people over the age of 65 in the Western world. In the US, more than 1.6 million people had one or both eyes affected by the advanced stage of AMD, another 7 million were estimated to be ''at risk'' and more than 230,000 people were deemed to be legally blind due to it. The direct cost of illness associated with AMD was estimated to be above $10 billion annually. Wet AMD (wAMD) accounted for 10% to 15% of the cases.