The eye disease physician in charge of a committee that flagged a rare but severe side effect involving a newly approved drug from Apellis Pharmaceuticals has financial ties to a competing drugmaker. The conflict raises questions about his supervision of an emerging safety issue for patients and its impact on the financial health of Apellis.
Peter Kaiser, a retinal disease expert who runs the Cole Eye Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, failed to report consulting fees and stock ownership in Iveric Bio on a financial disclosure form maintained by the American Society of Retina Specialists, or ASRS. Iveric Bio is developing a treatment for geographic atrophy, a common, age-related cause of vision loss and the same indication for which the Apellis drug was approved.
The financial conflict, which was undisclosed until after Kaiser was contacted about it by STAT, is relevant because Kaiser also chairs a committee of the ASRS responsible for monitoring the safety of retina drugs and devices. On July 15, Kaiser’s committee sent a letter to member doctors, alerting them to reports of eye inflammation in people receiving injections of Syfovre, the treatment recently approved and launched by Apellis.