>What better way to aim high than to put your [experimental] drug on a durable implant?<
Putting an experimental drug into an experimental delivery platform incurs regulatory headaches that many companies would rather not address. That’s why I do not consider this one of the most likely standard-of-care options to emerge in the next few years.
We see this kind of reluctance also in the hepatitis and cancer arenas, where a cocktail of experimental drugs may be a compelling choice from a scientific standpoint, but no one is willing to undertake the clinical trials and each company instead pushes its own drug in combination with already-approved therapies.
p.s. I commented in slightly greater detail about the news@nature.com AMD article in #msg-13290137.