AST Vision Care’s Asqelio intraocular lens (IOL) range has been introduced to Australian ophthalmologists over a dinner at the Sergeants Mess in Mosman, overlooking Sydney Harbour.
Hosted by distributor IQ Medical, the local surgeons were addressed by two guest speakers – Dr Patrick Versace of Bondi Eye Doctors in Sydney, and Professor Alejandro Cerviño Expósito, of the University of Valencia in Spain. Prof Cerviño Expósito sits on AST’s medical advisory board as executive director and chair, has authored more than 160 scientific publications, and is an internationally recognised figure in visual optics and refractive technologies.
Opening proceedings, Michael Scobie, Managing Director of IQ Medical, welcomed guests to what he described as the company’s first opportunity to bring the Asqelio range to Australian surgeons – a decision he said was not taken lightly. IQ Medical, he said, had for some time been hearing from surgeons keen for the company to offer more in the extended range of vision space, but had held off until the right partner emerged.
“We made a deliberate decision to not rush,” he told the room, adding that the company had spent several years searching for the “world’s best material with optical designs that set a new standard” rather than settling for “just any EDOF or trifocal off the shelf”.
That search ended, he said, when AST acquired the IOL manufacturer his team already knew and trusted, MBI, pairing a hydrophobic acrylic platform IQ Medical had confidence in with what he called “genuinely innovative approaches to optical design”.
“There still remains a need for a full range of focus in a lens with good quality of vision that tolerates defocus”
Unmet Need Despite Crowded Field
Between them, Dr Versace and Prof Cerviño Expósito offered a clinical and scientific account of where the new trifocal and extended depth of focus (EDOF) lenses sit in an increasingly crowded premium IOL market.
Dr Versace opened by posing the question every surgeon in the room was likely asking themselves: with dozens of presbyopia-correcting lenses already available, why does the market need another one? His answer was that despite a decade of EDOF options and 40 years since the first multifocal lens, no single platform yet delivers a genuinely full range of vision without compromising quality. “There still remains a need for a full range of focus in a lens with good quality of vision that tolerates defocus,” he said, noting that patients left even half a dioptre off target should not lose the benefit of an EDOF design.
He walked the audience through the current landscape, from diffractive trifocals such as Odyssey and PanOptix Pro through to refractive and spherical-aberration-based designs, including LuxSmart and the Galaxy lens. Diffractive optics, he argued, remain the most versatile technology for engineering a defocus curve, but “all diffractive lenses give haloes, 100%” – a line that drew nods around the room. Non-diffractive alternatives promised relief from that trade-off, he said, but so far none had proven entirely free of unwanted visual phenomena either. He told guests that the Asqelio IOLs worked on a different optical principle again, and he was glad to have Professor Cerviño Expósito on hand to explain it.
The Science Behind Asqelio
Prof Cerviño Expósito used his address to trace AST’s history from its 1989 origins as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off focused on coating technologies, through to its decision in 2015 to begin designing its own lenses, arguing that the company’s engineering-led culture and in-house manufacturing shape everything about how Asqelio has been built.
He said the high Abbe number and low water content of Asqelio’s IOL material underpins both its optical clarity and its long-term safety profile, citing follow-up data showing posterior capsule opacification of around 4% at two years. Turning to the trifocal model, he outlined the platform’s variable intermediate vision technology (VIVIS), which places the intermediate and near foci close together to create what he called “almost like an extended range of vision” between them, with correspondingly less scattered light and fewer dysphotopsias than older trifocal designs.
For the EDOF and enhanced-vision lenses, he detailed the axicon-based “phase ring” technology, in which a tilted zone on the lens periphery creates constructive interference – a Bessel beam – that extends the range of focus while the central optical zone remains dedicated to distance vision. Because engagement of that peripheral zone depends on pupil size, he said, “distance vision is preserved” under night-driving conditions, with the extended range coming into play as the pupil constricts.
Promising Early Clinical Experience
Returning to the microphone, Dr Versace shared his early clinical impressions of the Asqelio EDOF lens. He praised its handling characteristics in practical terms, noting its low glass transition temperature meant the lens unfolded readily in the eye rather than sitting “stuck”. This, he said, is in contrast to some rival hydrophobic platforms. Reviewing published defocus curves, he told guests the lens delivered roughly two dioptres of extended depth of focus compared with a monofocal, ahead of comparators such as Vivity and PureSee.
Dr Versace said what had surprised him most in his own small patient cohort was the near vision achieved. “I was very surprised to see a cluster still seeing 6/6 and the sort of N6 to N8 range, which is much more near vision than I would expect for what is supposed to be an EDOF lens.” Impressively, he added, this had come without the unwanted visual phenomena that trouble many multifocal patients: “these patients are not getting haloes. They’re not complaining of anything in their vision”.
The evening closed with an open panel discussion, in which the two speakers fielded questions on spherical aberration targets, toric rotational stability, public funding pathways for premium lenses and the broader history of axicon-based optics in the IOL market.
