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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.

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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.

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