The anti-cancer drug Avastin is as effective as Lucentis at treating progressive vision loss in people with wet age-related macular degeneration, researchers reported last week in the first head-to-head study of the two drugs. The finding could pave the way for the regulatory approval of Avastin (bevacizumab), which, at less than $100 per injection, costs only a fraction of the much more expensive $2000-per-shot Lucentis (ranibizumab).

In June, we reported the results of a large multi-center trial conducted by the US National Eye Institute that tested the efficacy of Lucentis in treating a related vision disorder called diabetic macular edema. The trial was highly criticized for not including Avastin in the study, and for taking money and free drugs from South San Francisco–based Genentech, the company that makes both Avastin, a monoclonal antibody that blocks a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and Lucentis, which is a truncated form of Avastin.

“My frustration is that tax dollars were used to subsidize industry-sponsored research,” Philip Rosenfeld, an ophthalmologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, told Nature Medicine at the time.

The organizers of the government-sponsored trial defended the decision to include only Lucentis as being “based on the science that we had at the time,” and said they would look to direct comparisons of the drugs in treating macular degeneration before deciding whether to launch a head-to-head study of Avastin and Lucentis for macular edema.

Now those results have come in. In a small, one-year, randomized study of people with macular degeneration, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine found similar levels of vision improvement in the 15 patients who took Avastin and the seven patients on Lucentis. The findings were published in the journal Eye.