Balancing risk in ophthalmic prescribing: assessing the safety of anti-VEGF therapies and the risks associated with unlicensed medicines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitor medications such as ranibizumab, pegaptanib and bevacizumab are in use for the treatment of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and other retinal conditions, although only ranibizumab and pegaptanib are approved for these conditions. In contrast, bevacizumab was developed for the intravenous systemic treatment of colorectal cancer and is not formulated for intravitreal use, but is commonly used off-label in ophthalmology. European Union legislation permits the use of drugs outside the terms of their licence ('off-label') only under certain circumstances, such as during clinical trials, compassionate/named patient use in the absence of a licensed alternative, emergency scenarios (e.g., pandemics) or at the discretion of a treating physician. In such cases, patients should be fully informed regarding their treatment and any potential risks involved. Off-label drug use can be an important tool to provide patients with treatment in cases of unmet medical need. However, the use of an unlicensed medicinal product, when a suitable licensed alternative is available, puts prescribing physicians at risk of liability if safety issues arise. Emerging clinical evidence suggests safety differences exist between ranibizumab and bevacizumab.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".