“Forty percent of patients in this country alone in the first year drop out [of current retinal disease treatments] and every one of those patients ends up going blind. By far the most expensive disease in the world is blindness and the reason for that is really quite simple. It’s because the mortality doesn’t change, the use of resources skyrockets, but the mortality doesn’t change. In this country, every blind patient costs over $66,000 a year,” says Pravin Dugel, CEO of Ocular Therapeutix. “If we reduce that dropout rate by even 10% with Axpaxli, and I’m sure we’ll do even better, we’re talking about a quarter million fewer patients in this country alone who will not go blind. The impact of that, not just on a human basis but on an economic basis, is astronomical.” In this episode of the Vanguards of Healthcare podcast, Pravin sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Ann-Hunter van Kirk to discuss how the company can reduce the therapeutic and economic burden of retinal diseases.