Ocular Therapeutix at Bank of America 2025: Strategic Insights on ExPaxley

On Tuesday, 13 May 2025, Ocular Therapeutix (NASDAQ:OCUL) participated in the Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference, providing a strategic overview of its lead product, ExPaxley, for wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The company highlighted both challenges and opportunities in the competitive market, emphasizing its progress in clinical trials and regulatory strategy.

Key Takeaways

• Ocular Therapeutix is advancing ExPaxley, a treatment for wet AMD, focusing on less frequent dosing and sustained delivery to improve patient outcomes.
• The company has received an amendment to its SOLO-one and SOLO-two studies, facilitating a potential superior label without jeopardizing the Special Protocol Assessment (SPA).
• High dropout rates in current wet AMD treatments underscore the need for ExPaxley’s sustainable treatment approach.
• Phase 3 trials, SOLO-one and SOLAR, aim to demonstrate ExPaxley’s superiority and non-inferiority, respectively, with top-line data from SOLAR expected in early 2026.
• Ocular Therapeutix is exploring ExPaxley’s potential for other conditions, such as non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR).

FDA Relations and Regulatory Strategy

• Ocular Therapeutix maintains a consistent and collaborative relationship with the FDA, as highlighted by CEO Praveen Dugal.
• The company received an amendment to its SOLO-one and SOLO-two studies without affecting the SPA, indicating adherence to FDA guidelines.
• The SOLO-one amendment allows for treatment every six months, potentially leading to a superior label with 12-month durability data.

ExPaxley Differentiation and Market Opportunity

• ExPaxley addresses unmet needs in the wet AMD market, where high dropout rates and vision decline persist despite existing treatments.
• The drug’s design aims to prevent fibrosis and atrophy, offering a sustainable treatment option with less frequent dosing.
• ExPaxley requires no new equipment or workflow changes, simplifying adoption for healthcare providers.

Clinical Trial Design and Progress

• Ocular Therapeutix is conducting two Phase 3 trials: SOLO-one (superiority) and SOLAR (non-inferiority).
• Both trials include a loading phase to select appropriate patient populations.
• SOLO-one focuses on patients with high VEGF receptor responsiveness, while SOLAR targets stable patients.
• The primary endpoint for SOLAR is the percentage of patients maintaining vision at month nine, with a target separation of 15%.

Commercial Strategy and Future Outlook

• The company aims for a superior label based on SOLO-one, potentially the first of its kind in the field.
• Ocular Therapeutix plans to leverage numeric analyses from the high-dose Eylea masking arm in SOLAR for commercial advantage.
• Exploring ExPaxley’s potential for NPDR, the company believes it can justify premium pricing due to its ability to reduce dropout rates and prevent blindness.

In conclusion, Ocular Therapeutix’s presentation at the Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference highlighted its strategic focus on advancing ExPaxley through rigorous clinical trials and regulatory processes. Readers can refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference:

Tazeen: Our next presenting company with us, sitting next to me from Ocular Therapeutics is Praveen Dugal, who is Executive Chair, President, as well as CEO. Praveen, thanks for flying over to the West Coast for us today.

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Thank you, Tazeen. Thank you for having us again in this wonderful conference. Really appreciate it.

Tazeen: So I’ve been starting off with macro questions for my companies, which is a new one for me. So you guys are not yet commercial, so most of these won’t apply to you. But I I will ask you for your updated thoughts as it relates to any potential changes that that you’ve noticed at FDA, let’s say, the next over the last one or two months with your division, people that you talk to, the timelines for how things are getting done, etcetera?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: You know, luckily, nothing at all. And I really do mean that. The FDA is very consistent, very, very collaborative, and nothing has changed. The people are exactly the same other than Wiley Chambers retiring. Bill Boyd has taken over now, but everybody beneath that is exactly the same, the same people that have been there for decades and decades.

You know, what I will tell you is there are some things that have happened that reflect that, both to us and outside. You know, what I would point to are two things, and I’ll just use them as an example because I think there are quite a few, but two things. You know, one is the CRL that was recently received by Regeneron, for instance. I think that is absolutely consistent with what the FDA has been saying all the time, which is that they want studies to be well designed, well masked, etcetera. And I think that’s right in line with what we have given our SPA and given our Type C validation.

The second thing that I will tell you is our amendment that we recently announced in the SOLO-one and SOLO-two studies. The fact that we received that amendment without jeopardizing our SPA at all shows you the collaborative relationship that we have with the FDA and the fact that we are following their guidelines to a T. So nothing has changed. Our collaboration and consistency remains.

Tazeen: Okay. So when I said you weren’t commercial, meant as it relates to X Paxley, you’re not So let’s talk about X Paxley. You’re developing it for treatment of wet AMD. Some initially might have asked, well, isn’t that a crowded market? You’ve got a lot of drugs that are currently available.

You’ve got a recent generic launch, but you’re a retina specialist, so you’re an end user of these products. So can you talk to us about, I guess, number one, what differentiates ExPaxly? And then just to give everybody a reminder, you came out of, I guess, retirement to take this job. You do have another side gig. Think it’s winemaking now.

Clearly, could take all of your time if you wanted to. But what was it about the profile of this company that made you decide that this was the right time to be CEO of a company and process of becoming commercial again?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Yeah. So as a segue from the macro questions, let me also add that, look, with expaxially also, nothing has changed in this macro environment. Our entire manufacturing, all the products are in The U. S, our IP is in The U. S, and we feel that we are in great position, particularly with the SPA and the Type C validation.

As far as my journey is concerned, yeah, you are right, I was retired for all of three months, very happily retired, wasn’t looking really for a job. As a retina specialist who’s practiced for thirty years, as miraculous as these drugs are, and I really do mean miraculous, You know, I’m old enough to remember when we used to sit in front of patients and what we could do was to predict or try to predict when they were going to go blind so their affairs were in order. That’s when I started practicing. Not only that, but a standard of care at that time was to literally laser the fovea we’d actually blind the patient. Somebody would be coming in a twentysixty vision, say, Look, I’m going go ahead and laser the center of your vision because your blind spot will be smaller in two years than it would have been if I didn’t laser you.

And that’s where I started my training. And then to come and see what Lucentis and Eylea have done, especially with macular degeneration being in my family and my father, for instance, being treated, is truly miraculous. However, we’ve had the same treatment now for almost four decades, right? And you’ve got to kind of step back, and I don’t mean to be critical of this, but it’s truly unacceptable and tragic that forty years later in this country alone, in the very first year there are still forty percent of patients that drop out of treatment, forty percent that end up going blind in this country because the treatment is simply not sustainable. So we have a known target, we have a known solution, and the next thing that we need is a sustainable treatment option.

And because of the opportunity out there and because of the personal interactions that I’ve had and the career that I’ve had, it was a no brainer for me to come here and run this company. And, I’m extremely glad that I did, that I am. As confident as I was when I came in, I’m many fold more confident in the success of this trial now that I’m seeing the trial conduction itself. Obviously, we’re masked, but what we’re seeing in SOLO-one makes me many fold more confident than I’ve been even before I came here.

Tazeen: Okay. So, let’s talk about the advantages of, less frequent dosing. Going back to your practicing days, what kind of a time commitment or what kind of burden is it for patients to be able to come to a doctor’s office to get an injection, whatever it was, once every four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, whatever? And how is this really, paradigm shifting basically, by allowing patients less frequent dosing? Can you talk about the dosing that you’re looking for?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Yeah, let me just tell you typically what happens. I mean, all talk to your KOLs and you ask them, look, how long does it take to inject a patient? And they’ll all give you the same answers as I did for thirty years, I’d say, takes me a second. Well, takes the doctor a second, but you should follow the patient’s journey, right? The patient is oftentimes an elderly patient, usually needs a caretaker, takes, I don’t know, twenty minutes to find a parking spot in my office, they all have to go there and do a pre authorization check because insurances change, and this is an expensive drug.

That takes another forty minutes, and then you go through, you have the vision exam, you have the IOP check, you have OCT, you have dilation, you have consent. Now they’re already in there for like two, three hours, and then they see the nurse or the PA and they basically say, Oh, you know what, you need an injection. Then you go back through the whole thing with a consent, you see the doctor, you get an injection, you get the anesthetic and everything else, and you get the IOP checks to make sure everything’s okay, and then you go home. So the patient is a whole day affair and the caregiver as well, and typically what ends up happening is that, and this happened to me all the time, is that the patient comes in and the whole family is there, and I look at the patient and the family and say, You know, if we met a few years ago, there would be nothing to give you, but I’m very happy to tell you that we have a treatment now that’ll save you from going blind. However, you have to come in every month or every other month.

Immediately, the entire family says, Absolutely, you know, Jenny will bring granny and then John will bring granny and so on and so forth. But three or four visits later, the patient is tugging at me saying, You know, Jenny’s about to lose her job. She can’t take any more days off. Is it okay if I skip a visit or two visits or anything else? And pretty soon they drop off, and this happens all the time.

There are two problems we’re trying to solve, right? That’s one, and that’s the obvious one, which is the forty percent dropout rate in this country alone. The other problem that people don’t think about is that even the people that remain, and this is the other sad part, almost inevitably end up getting worse than baseline after about three to five years. Now think about that, so even if you come in religiously to get these injections, in three to five years you end up getting worse than baseline. We used to think that was because patients re bled, but actually re bleeding is very rare.

The reason for that inevitably is because it was fibrosis scarring atrophy and the reason that that happens is because of the episodic way in which we treat. The back of the eye because there’s fluid and it’s all neural tissue gets thick and thin and thick and thin. It’s like having multiple concussions over and over and over and over again. So it’s not surprising that you get scarring and atrophy and that’s how patients end up going blind. So the second problem we’re treating is that because we have a sustained delivery drug, instead of having these episodic on and off periods of suppression and loss of suppression and suppression, we have a constant suppression that continues and there is very, very good evidence that once you do that, you don’t get this thickening and thickening and thickening and that you don’t get the fibrosis and the atrophy that you would get.

So one problem that we are solving is that of sustainability. The second problem that we’re solving is that of better chronic long term outcomes.

Tazeen: Okay. So it’s not simply about dosing, it’s about, an overall better profile for the

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: patient. Exactly.

Tazeen: So you’re in phase three now, you’ve mentioned SOL-one and SOLAR. Can you talk to us about the differences between those two studies, why you’re running these and in the sequence that you’re running them?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Yeah, so look, this is not any credit to me. I’ve got the most, and I just say this freely, phenomenal retina team ever assembled in this planet and I’m very, very, very proud of them. They put this together. What everybody does, at least in my field, everybody that I know is kind of a no brainer is they repeat the same trial again, right, because you need two trials that are successful to be approved. And everybody’s done that, ANCHOR, MARINA, V1, V2, Hawk, Harrier, even trials going on now.

We didn’t do that. And the reason we didn’t do that is because when you think about it, although the second trial validates the first trial and allows for approval, it doesn’t provide any further information. I mean it’s real opportunity that’s lost. So what we did was we did two complementary trials. One is a superiority trial called SOUL-one and the other is a non inferior trial called SOLAR and they’re absolutely complementary and they’ve worked beautifully and we can go into detail about that, but what we have done in each of these trials, which I’m also very proud of, is that we have gone through a loading phase and the loading phase before randomization is to super select an enhanced and de risk patient population.

People don’t realize is that macular degeneration is about as variable as colon cancer or lung cancer or bladder cancer. If I went in to talk to you and said, you know, I’ve got a drug for colon cancer, you wouldn’t just allow me to talk away. You would say, what do you mean colon cancer? What kind of colon cancer? What stage?

What grade? AMD, wet AMD is equally variable. The problem is we’re fifty years behind oncology at least. We don’t have a genetic marker. We have no anatomic biomarkers.

We have no way of knowing how patients will respond to treatment. That’s why we do something called treatment extent, which is we kind of play it by ear, right? We treat and we say this patient can go for four weeks, this patient can go for six months, but that’s fine in a clinical setting. But when you have clinical trials like we do and you want predictability in the patients that you’re enrolling, so we’ve gone out of our way to have a very, very thoughtful and bespoke loading phase, as a ramp to specifically select the kind of patients that we need for each trial. And each is different.

For the SOUL-one which is a superiority study, what we’ve done is to select patients that have the most amount of VEGF receptors and we’ve tested them to be responsive. So this is a superiority study where we load twice, we require that patients improve by 10 letters or more or get to twentytwenty, so we load them up and we allow them to fail once. So it’s a perfect design for a superiority study. On the other hand, for SOLAR, which is a non inferiority study, we want absolute stability. So we’ve got three loading phases and then we have something that nobody else has ever had before, really quite unique, which is we have two opportunities to observe the patient.

And what we’re observing for is any kind of instability. Once we ensure that patients that are unstable or VEGF dependent are weeded out, then we have two more loading doses and only then do we randomize. So, you know, it’s not just about recruiting patients, it’s about recruiting the right patients for the right study in a bespoke manner and I think our team has done that very thoughtfully.

Tazeen: And how do both of these studies together help with what ultimately would be the pitch that, a field force, person would make to a retinal specialist?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Look, helps in many, many ways and I’m glad you said both studies because remember neither study will ever be looked at alone, right? You need two successful studies. So that affords us a huge amount of advantage logistically, commercially and from a regulatory point of view. So let me just talk about each separately. So logistically, we never lost a patient and that’s really important because what we did was when we had SOLA-one going, we started SOLA-one and SOLA-one, the non inferiority study, what I required of that was that it not only not cannibalized from the recruitment of SOLA-one but that it actually helped the recruitment of SOLA-one and that’s exactly what it did because everybody had to go through SOLA-one first and if they screen failed, then they went to SOLAR.

And we didn’t lose anybody. So nobody had to say to a patient, look, you don’t qualify. And that helped greatly because in January we were able to say, look, we already have three eleven patients enrolled in SOLAR, and this was just bolus on from SOLAR-one. So logistically it helped a great deal. And more recently with the amendment that we may talk about, we’re able to reduce the size of SOLAR because we’re able to extend SOLAR-one.

So that worked beautifully. So from a logistic point of view, it worked perfectly. From a commercial point of view, look we have the potential to have the finest label, the best label that this field has ever seen.

Tazeen: And what would that be?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: A superiority, and this, again, we’re not in labeling discussions, I want to make that very, very clear. These are all hypothetical discussions and this is potentially the best label, want to make that clear as well. It would be a superiority label, the first and only one in its field based on SOL1. It will be a label that allows the flexibility of treatment of every six months based on SOLAR to every twelve months based on SOL1 and also repeatability based on SOLAR. And additionally, from a commercial point of view, it also allows us to discuss the numeric analyses that we could do with high dose Eylea.

Remember, we don’t have any sham as per the FDA’s guidelines because sham is at risk. We’ve never taken any risk. So we need a masking arm in SOLAR. So for that masking arm we deliberately chose high dose Eylea. That’s not for statistical analysis, that’s for numeric analysis and we will be able to leverage that data to our advantage from a commercial point of view.

And finally the third part that this affords is a regulatory advantage because nobody is going see one study alone. So when somebody sees for instance the number of rescues say in SOLAR, they will see that in the context of a positive SOL-one knowing that this drug can last for nine to twelve months. So, from a logistic point of view, from a commercial point of view, from a regulatory point of view, this trial design, this complementary trial design gives us an enormous advantage.

Tazeen: I’ll also, point out that enrollment rates certainly for SOL-one was much faster than anyone expected, and I suspect also for SOLAR. So for SOLAR, you will be releasing top line data, in the first quarter of next year?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Correct. First quarter of twenty twenty six.

Tazeen: That’s right. First quarter of next year. Yep. Okay.

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: That’s right.

Tazeen: I thought for a second, am I in right ear? So what would be good data on that study?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Look, again, at the end of the day, our goal is to hit the primary endpoint, right? And the primary endpoint requires a separation of delta of 15%. And remember the primary endpoint is at month nine, the primary endpoint is the percentage of patients who maintain vision. That’s our goal. We believe that we will beat that and there will be many other analyses that will be, we think, very favorable to us in SOLA-one.

It will also be viewed in the context of SOLAR. Let me just say a few things here. So the goal really is at the primary endpoint, but let me just say as I’ve described in detail, this is not a typical patient population in either study by design. This is not the patients that walk in the door of somebody in Nevada or Idaho or New York. These are specifically de risk patients in SOLE-one that are designed to fail.

We are very, very, very happy with the rescue rates and the cadence of rescue and fact that the rescues are vastly on protocol. We’re seeing this in a massed fashion, but really we feel very confident, more confident than ever with what we see that we’ll hit that delta and exceed that delta. That would be success, of course. In SOLAR, we’ll gain even more information. We’ll find out how this drug does in a non inferiority context versus what is the standard of care, EYLEA two milligram.

We’ll also have the numeric analysis based on high dose EYLEA. So I think we’ll have a lot of information doctors and patients and payers, and I will repeat again, I couldn’t be happier, and I just want to make this very, very clear. The primary goal of this company right now is the conduct of SOL1. We’re going to deliver an extraordinarily clean study, studies SOL1 and SOLAR to the FDA, extraordinarily clean. The primary goal here and what we assess ourselves at in terms of how we assess our success under masking is to look at three things.

We look at the number of rescues under masking in SOUL one, we look at the cadence of those rescues, and we look to see whether those rescues are on protocol or not. This is all under masking, and we’re thrilled with what we see. I couldn’t be more confident of the results of SOLE-one today. I was confident coming into this company, I’m many fold more confident today.

Tazeen: Yeah, and since you, made the changes to SOUL-one, you didn’t have to enroll as many patients into SOUL R, and so that study will presumably read out a bit faster than what we might have been thinking before. So can you lay out timelines for us? So SOL one reads out in the first quarter of twenty six. What then needs to happen, after that in order to be ready to apply

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: for approval? Yeah, so I’ll talk about the amendments separately because that’s a really important thing. We haven’t given you guidance as to the car churn in SOLAR as yet. We will when appropriate. And the reason is we just want to give you good data, you know, obviously and it’s a pretty long ramp as you know by design as we’ve discussed for de risking purposes.

But let me just talk about the amendment and why the bottom line is there are two takeaway messages from the amendment. You know, one, is the fact that we will get to the finish line much faster and much cheaper and the second goes back to an earlier question which is, you know, the relationship that we have with the FDA by following every one of their guidelines. Let me just tell you what happened. The team before us to their credit obtained a SPA for SOUL-one. However SOUL-one, the superiority study ended at month nine.

It ended when the primary endpoint was met. The FDA requires, not just from us but from everybody, a certain number of patients, about 300, to be followed for two years only for safety purposes, not for efficacy, only for safety. And because that study ended and we had a SPA at month nine, we needed to overweight the SOLAR study with eight twenty five patients to satisfy that requirement, not for powering but to satisfy that requirement. That was one. The second thing that happened also with that is our PIs came to us and said, hey look you put me in a really difficult position because once the study is positive at month nine, I’m gonna have to go to my patients and say look you’re done, can’t do anything for you because you’re have to wait until this drug is approved and that’s a really difficult discussion to have and they’re right.

The second thing is that we saw with the Vibismo label that the threshold for getting something on the label for durability was fairly low. They had got a four month label but there are actually a minority, a small number of patients that actually reached that mark and we were certain that many more would be able to cross the twelve month threshold with expaxial. So that was a really important thing for us, an opportunity for us. The third thing, and this was the gating item, all of us having the experience we have in retina have never seen patient retention as good as we are seeing in SOLA-one. We’ve just never seen it.

So putting these three things together, we went to the FDA and said look we do not want to jeopardize our SPA, can we extend our SOL-one study to year two and treat every six months with expaxially to maximize the exposure to satisfy your safety requirement? They said yes, and if so then can we decrease the size of SOLAR now that we can use those patients by a third instead of eight twenty five patients now we just need five fifty five patients? And they said yes, and we stayed masked, right, week 52 because now we have the potential of getting twelve months on the label by staying masked. So, we gave up nothing. That’s really important to note.

We didn’t change our statistics, our powering, we didn’t change our primary endpoint, our primary endpoint is still at month nine and now we have the potential of having a superb label with great commercial advantage and again this speaks to the fact that with this amendment we will get to the finish line much faster, much cheaper. It also speaks to the kind of collaboration we have with the FDA simply because we have followed every one of their guidelines and done everything they’ve asked us to do and taken no risk whatsoever.

Tazeen: Okay. So thanks for that, deep discussion about the reasons for the changes. So you mentioned getting twelve months on the label. You talked about it a few minutes ago about the patients and their journey and making it as convenient for them as possible. As you think, now this is thinking a little bit ahead about how doctors would think about a product where a patient may not need to, have a new insert put in until twelve months after the first one.

How does that change the way they treat patients? Do you think that they will still ask patients to come in to be examined? And how does that work into like the way they like to practice?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: It’s a great question. The beauty of this is that this will be adopted the day after it’s approved. I mean, there is no barrier to adoption here whatsoever. Nothing changes. The doctor’s offices don’t change.

The workflow doesn’t change. Everything remains the same. They simply reach out and get a better drug. The doctors will be happier, the payers will be happier, and the patients will be happier. Let just explain.

As I mentioned earlier on, there is a forty percent dropout rate in this country in the first year. Those patients end up going blind. It’s tragic, but it’s also extremely costly. They don’t drop out of the payer system, they drop out of coming in to see the doctor. A blind patient is very, very, very expensive.

There’s a huge amount of resources they use and mortality doesn’t change them at all. If we can decrease the dropout rate by even ten percent, that’s a quarter million less patients that will go blind in this country alone. That’s a huge impact and that’s also a huge cost savings. So, we are very, very happy not just to have that impact, but we think it will translate into a higher premium for the drug. We think that this will be a situation where the doctors will be able to also inject many, many more patients, just not the same patients over and over again because there’ll be fewer patients dropping out.

We think they’ll be happier as well, and obviously the patients will be happier and we haven’t even talked about the better long term outcomes. So, and there’s not a single piece of new equipment they have to buy, there’s no changes they need to make in the office, the workflow is exactly the same. The other important part is the experience is the same. Now remember what we do know is the doctors want to be able to make sure that when they inject that injection wound heals completely and closes completely. We know what threshold that is for that and we know that that threshold is at least 23 gauge.

We know this from the surgical experience. In our case, it’s going to be much more than that. We have a 25 gauge needle, so there’s no doubt that the experience is going to be the same, that the wound is going to close by itself. Nothing changes. I think it’ll be adopted very, very easily into the workflow.

I think in the beginning doctors will still do treat and extend quite honestly because that’s what they’re used to doing, but the needle will be shifted very much to the right. So a patient that may have required say EYLEA every month may now require ex Paxley, you know, every eight months. And someone that may have required every two months may now be every year or what have you. But after a while, because we’re very comfortable seeing patients every six months, I think what we will do is what all of the rest of medicine does, which is to treat on a fixed basis, and that’s what’s done in oncology, that’s what’s done in rheumatology everywhere, and I really believe that what will happen with this drug, which has a great safety net because it’ll last for nine to twelve months and it’s perfectly safe. There’s been no safety issue whatsoever.

I think this drug will simply be given on a fixed basis every six months.

Tazeen: Okay, and how does that tie with sort of the economics of how doctors are compensated?

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Well, you know, doctors are compensated based on ASP, of course, as you know, and again, we’re not in pricing discussions whatsoever, so I don’t want to assume that anybody should assume that we are, but we believe that we’ll be able to make a very good case for premium pricing based on what I’ve just mentioned. I mean, just think about 10% less of a dropout rate having a quarter million more patients that you can say are not going to go blind. I mean, that’s a great impact. And again, this is a known target. This is a known population.

We believe that the encatchment of patients will be massive, and this is just in wet AMD. This doesn’t even include, you know, the other disease that we haven’t talked about that we will be going after, which is non proliferative diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema. And we also know that in the history of our field, every single anti VEGF that has worked in wet AMD has also worked in diabetic retinopathy, diabetic macular edema, retinal vein occlusion, PCV, ROP, on and on. So the impact, the potential impact of this drug is massive. Now, you know, we’re a small company and we are laser focused on one thing.

So what we’re doing is, as I said, the number one thing that everybody talks about in this company, everybody, is to do one thing and one thing only right now, which is to make sure that SolarWinds is successful. And we’re well on track for that.

Tazeen: Okay. And last question maybe is to spend one minute. That’s all we have left. It deserves more on NPDR. Talk to us about where you are in development there.

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Well, we’re in great discussions with the FDA. We’re having fantastic discussions. We couldn’t be happier. We’re absolutely going to pursue that target. We obviously have no competition whatsoever.

We have the capital to do so and we will do so. The impact is going to be enormous. We are trying to be as responsible as possible in this unstable environment. We’re taking a bit of a pause to make sure that there’s some stability because at the end of the day, we’re doing everything we can to be fiscally responsible and respectful of our shareholders. The whole idea here is to maximize shareholder value.

That’s what I think about from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.

Tazeen: Okay, with that, we’re just about out of time. So Praveen, thanks again for coming. Everybody that joined in the room, appreciate your attendance. We’ll talk soon.

Praveen Dugal, Executive Chair, President, and CEO, Ocular Therapeutics: Thank you, Susan. Thanks for having us.

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