2025 Diabetic Retinopathy and Diabetic Macular Edema Pipeline

Watch as Peter K. Kaiser, MD, explains the poster and follow along with the graphics below.

Diabetic eye disease—diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic macular edema (DME)—affects 9.6 million Americans, with 1.8 million Americans experiencing vision-threatening DR.¹ Globally, 18.8 million patients have vision-threatening DR; that figure is expected to grow to 44.8 million by 2045.²

The good news: the pipeline for treatments remains robust. Researchers have identified dozens of potential targets. Perhaps even more exciting: outside-the-box approaches to drug administration mean that more comfortable, accessible, and effective treatments could reduce treatment burden and improve outcomes. Just think what it could mean for our patients if, rather than visiting (and sometimes not visiting) our clinics for routine injections, they could swallow a pill or inject a subcutaneous therapy from home.

For this inaugural edition of the diabetes pipeline poster, we have organized the various treatments and pipeline candidates by route of administration rather than by therapeutic target. In some cases, a single therapeutic approach is under investigation via multiple routes of administration. Take the tyrosine kinase inhibitor vorolanib, for example. Four different formulations of this molecule are under investigation for the treatment of diabetic eye disease: two are intravitreal injections, one is an oral agent, and one is an eye drop.

On the right side of the poster, I called out the three routes of administration for gene therapy, listing the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. For now, there is only a single gene therapy under investigation for DR. I hope that by next year we have more candidates to populate that list.

Observant readers will recognize the cell surface on the left side of the poster (and the legend showing various receptors at the base of the poster) from the poster covering the wet age-related macular degeneration pipeline Retina Today released earlier this year. These two posters are siblings, which explains why they look alike. View the age-related macular degeneration poster.

If you have a drug candidate that you think should be on next year’s version of the poster, reach out to me at pkkaiser@gmail.com or contact Cara Deming, Executive Director of Special Projects at Bryn Mawr Communications, at cdeming@bmctoday.com.

1. Lundeen EA, Burke-Conte Z, Rein DB, et al. Prevalence of diabetic retinopathy in the US in 2021. JAMA Ophthalmol. 2023;141(8):747-754.

2. Teo ZL, Tham YC, Yu M, et al. Global prevalence of diabetic retinopathy and projection of burden through 2045: systematic review and meta-analysis. Ophthalmology. 2021;128(11):1580-1591.