SightGlass Vision's DOT Lenses Pass Two Million Wearers, but Australian Optometrists Are Still Waiting on a Local Launch
SightGlass Vision has confirmed that more than two million children worldwide have now been fitted with its DOT™ (Diffusion Optics Technology) spectacle lenses, doubling its wearer numbers in under 12 months. The joint venture between CooperVision and Essilor International passed the one-million mark only last August, making this one of the faster scale-ups seen in the myopia management category.
DOT lenses, first launched commercially in 2021, are positioned by the company as the first spectacle design to slow myopia progression through contrast management rather than peripheral defocus, the mechanism underpinning rival designs such as Essilor's Stellest and HOYA's MiyoSmart. CEO Andrew Sedgwick framed the milestone as validation of the underlying science, telling media the figure was a reminder of the clinical need the lenses were built to address, and said the result would spur further collaboration with prescribing clinicians.
Clinicians point to easy adaptation
Practitioners quoted in the announcement pointed to patient compliance as much as clinical results. Teddy Chow of The Chow Eye Institute in Canada, an early adopter of the lenses, said most children stopped noticing them within days and simply wore them as everyday glasses. That, he argues, matters as much as any figure on a data sheet, since the most effective treatment is the one a child will actually keep wearing. In the UK, Craig McArthur of Peter Ivins Eye Care said rising screen time had sharpened parental concern about early-onset myopia, and that having robust clinical evidence to point to made those conversations easier.
New two-year CATHAY data
The announcement was paired with fresh two-year results from SightGlass's CATHAY study, run in Chinese children. Across the full cohort, aged 6 to 13, DOT lens wearers showed 67 per cent less myopia progression (0.78D) and 62 per cent less axial elongation (0.40mm) than a control group after two years. In the youngest band studied, children aged 6 to 10, the lenses were associated with more than 1.00D of progression saved on average over the same period, a group that typically shows the fastest progression rates and the least favourable outcomes with many existing interventions.
Yuping Chen, SightGlass's Commercial Director for China, said uptake in the market had been particularly strong, reflecting how acutely childhood myopia is felt there. The company's underlying theory holds that the contrast levels typical of modern, artificial environments differ meaningfully from natural settings, and may drive faster eye growth; DOT lenses aim to counter this using thousands of light-scattering elements embedded in the lens to soften contrast before it reaches the retina. SightGlass has also rolled out a "Control the Contrast" education program aimed at helping ECPs get up to speed on the mechanism, which remains less familiar to many practitioners than defocus-based designs.
Still no Australian launch date
For Australian eyecare professionals, the more pointed detail may be what's missing from the release: this country. DOT lenses are currently sold in Canada, China, Israel, Spain and the UK, with SightGlass flagging further market entries later in 2026. Australia, however, has not featured in any of the company's launch announcements to date, and there is no confirmed timeline or therapeutic goods listing locally. That leaves Australian practitioners managing paediatric myopia with Stellest and MiyoSmart as the established spectacle-based options, while DOT's contrast-management approach remains something local ECPs can read about in the clinical literature rather than prescribe.
SightGlass Vision was founded in 2016 and operates as a joint venture of CooperVision, Inc. and Essilor International.
