gms | German Medical Science

In the second half of the 20th century there were very few really significant advances in glaucoma surgery. Large pharmaceutical companies dominated glaucoma therapy and continued to promote early diagnosis potentially increasing drug sales. In the last 4 years most glaucoma medications have become generic and there is little likelihood of a new class of glaucoma medications appearing that might compete effectively in the marketplace with generic latanoprost.

While new glaucoma medical therapy innovation is occurring in the drug delivery arena, there has been unprecendented investment in ophthalmic innovation in terms of investment.

A significant proportion of this investment is in new glaucoma devices, fuelled not only by an unmet market need, but also by a dramatic slowing in corneo-refractive innovation eg. failure to cure presbyopia.

New glaucoma surgical devices fall roughly into two camps, those that make an attractive add-on procedure to cataract surgery, potentially helping to reduce the glaucoma medication burden in the longer term. These devices have a theoretical widespread appeal to cataract as well as glaucoma surgeons.

The second camp is the more technically challenging procedure eg. Involving the use of mitomycin C that will more likely appeal to glaucoma specialists and not the overall cataract surgical community.

This talk will review these classes of device, likely new entrants and their relative positioning in the market place.