Thousands of people with a devastating eye disease will have their sight saved by a new drug set to be approved for use by the NHS, a charity has said.
The Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) welcomed the news that the health watchdog will approve Lucentis for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
AMD is the leading cause of sight loss in the UK and destroys the central region of the retina, the macula, leading to progressive loss of sight.
It comes in two forms - wet and dry - with the dry form being far more common. But the wet type is the more aggressive and accounts for around 90% of blindness caused by the condition.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) will publish a final appraisal document recommending Lucentis (also called ranibizumab) for treating wet AMD. If there are no appeals, final guidance will be published in June and the NHS is expected to implement it.
Around 19,000 of the 26,000 people diagnosed with wet AMD each year live in England and Wales. Lucentis is already approved in Scotland.
Nice recommends the use of Lucentis as long as several conditions are met in the eye to be treated. These include evidence of recent progression of the disease and no permanent structural damage to the central fove - the centre most part of the macula.
It also announced that the NHS would only fund 14 injections, with the cost of any more being met by the manufacturer, in this case Novartis. The cost of a single Lucentis injection is £761.20 (excluding VAT).
Last year, more than 13,000 people expressed their concerns at the original draft guidance produced by Nice, which said Lucentis should be funded by the NHS only when both eyes were affected - and used only to treat the eye least affected.
Steve Winyard, head of campaigns at the RNIB, said: "Countless patients have already been either robbed of their sight, or stripped of their life savings, to pay for private treatment. Today marks a crucial turning point in the way patients with wet AMD will be treated."