Pegaptanib, or Macugen, is an anti-vascular endothelial growth factor therapy that gained U.S. regulatory approval this month as a treatment for age-related macular degeneration, or AMD.

Dr. Evangelos Gragoudas, a professor at Harvard Medical School, says two concurrent, prospective, double-blind, multi-center clinical trials show that pegaptanib has been shown to produce a statistically significant and clinically meaningful benefit in the treatment of wet AMD.

His paper on the subject appears in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Wet AMD, also known as neovascular AMD, accounts for about 10 percent of the overall disease prevalence but is responsible for 90 percent of the severe vision loss of all AMD cases.

In wet AMD, abnormal blood vessels grow under the central retina causing a loss of central vision.

Pegaptanib is designed to target the source of the disease and blocks the pathological form of a chemical called VEGF, produced in the eye of patients with wet AMD.