Intraocular Injection of Stivant® (A Biosimilar to Bevacizumab): A Case Series

Purpose: to report the results of intravitreal injection of a bevacizumab biosimilar called stivant®. methods: this prospective interventional case series was conducted on eyes with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (namd), retinal vein occlusion (rvo), and diabetic macularedema (dme). stivant® was injected in three consecutive months and changes in best-corrected visual acuity (bcva) and central macular thickness (cmt) were measured at baseline and monthly up to one month after the third injection.results: three hundred and eighty-five eyes with dme (234 eyes, 61%), namd (87 eyes, 22%), and macular edema secondary to rvo (64 eyes, 17%) were enrolled. the mean ± standard deviation age of the patients was 61.7 ± 7.20 years. the mean bcva and cmt changed from 0.63 ± 0.3 to 0.51 ± 0.3 logmar (p = 0.12 ) and from 420.4 ± 47.3μm at baseline to 316.7 ± 50.6 μm (p < 0.001) in the dme group; from 0.79 ± 0.3 to 0.68 ± 0.3 logmar (p = 0.19) and from 376.1 ± 31.7 μm to 303 ± 31.3 μm (p = 0.019) in the namd group; and from 0.81 ± 0.4 to 0.63 ± 0.4 logmar (p = 0.05) and from 424.21 ± 18 μm to 303.4 ± 18.8 μm (p < 0.001) in the rvo group, respectively. conclusion: our limited experience showed that the intravitreal injection of stivant® was well tolerated. although the results of this case series showed relative improvement in cmt one month after the last injection of stivant®, bcva improvement was statistically significant only in the rvo group. this would be essential to design a randomized clinical trial to evaluate the non-inferiority of stivant® in comparison to bevacizumab.