A laser fires for a few minutes. It never touches the eye with a blade. Somewhere inside the trabecular meshwork, a 500-micron channel opens and the pressure that steals sight begins to drain away. Selling that idea to surgeons is the job.
CEO, ViaLase · ex-Sight Sciences · ex-Alcon · Southlake, TX
In July 2025, the founder of ViaLase - a laser physicist named Tibor Juhasz, the same mind behind the femtosecond lasers that reshaped LASIK and cataract surgery - stepped sideways. He moved from chief executive to president and chief technology officer, back toward the optics. The seat he left was filled by the person who had spent the previous years figuring out how to sell what Juhasz had built. That person is Shawn O'Neil.
O'Neil is a first-time CEO with an unusual amount of practice. Before ViaLase he was its Chief Commercial Officer. Before that, Chief Commercial Officer at Sight Sciences in Menlo Park. And before that, more than two decades - about 22 years - at Alcon, the eye-care giant, where he climbed to head of sales and marketing for surgical glaucoma. He studied Economics at Princeton, then spent thirty years in operating rooms he never operated in.
Read his resume sideways and it turns into a parts list for modern eye surgery. The EX-PRESS Glaucoma Filtration Device. The LenSx Laser System. The CyPass Micro-Stent. The OMNI Surgical System. The TearCare System. Each one a device that changed how a specific eye problem gets handled. O'Neil's name is on the launch of every one of them. He is the person who walks into a surgeon's office holding something the surgeon has never used and walks out having convinced them to try it on a human eye.
ViaLase's technology will fuel the practice of non-invasive, interventional glaucoma, giving doctors an opportunity to intervene earlier with a potentially safe and effective procedure.
Glaucoma is a pressure problem. Fluid that should drain out of the eye backs up, the pressure climbs, and over years it quietly kills the optic nerve. The standard answers have always involved doing something physical: cutting, stenting, implanting, or building a tiny blister of drainage called a bleb. They work. They also carry the friction of surgery, which is why doctors tend to wait until the disease is advanced before reaching for them.
ViaLase's pitch is to remove the physical part. The procedure is called FLIGHT - Femtosecond Laser Image-Guided High-Precision Trabeculotomy - and it is exactly as much of a mouthful in person. A femtosecond laser, guided by real-time imaging, fires through the cornea and carves a drainage channel roughly 500 by 200 microns wide directly inside the trabecular meshwork. No incision. No implant. No bleb. The eye is never opened. The laser does its work and the patient goes home.
The dual imaging view gives confidence that doctors can identify the proper landmarks and place the treatment exactly where they want it, each and every time, with no damage to adjacent tissue.
That last phrase - "each and every time" - is the whole sales problem in five words. A surgeon will forgive a tool that is hard but reliable. What they will not forgive is a tool that is precise on Tuesday and wanders on Thursday. O'Neil's argument is that the imaging takes the guesswork out, and that once a doctor trusts the placement, the calculus of glaucoma changes. If treatment carries almost no surgical cost, you can do it earlier - before the nerve damage piles up - instead of waiting for the disease to force your hand.
Plenty of medtech companies are founded by the engineer and run by the engineer until they die. ViaLase did something else. It moved its commercial leader into the top job at exactly the moment the company stopped being a science project and started being a business that has to sell. The CE mark landed in Europe in 2024. The first commercial FLIGHT procedures followed. In December 2025, ViaLase treated the first patient in its U.S. investigational device exemption trial, the formal road toward an American approval. Each of those milestones is less about whether the physics works - it does - and more about whether the market will pay for it, adopt it, and reimburse it. That is O'Neil's native language.
He is also, geographically, a slight outlier. ViaLase is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California. O'Neil runs it from Southlake, Texas - a reminder that the modern medtech executive lives on airplanes and in the offices of the surgeons he is trying to convince, not in a corporate atrium.
Strip away the acronyms and O'Neil's aspiration is a single category that does not quite exist yet: non-invasive interventional glaucoma. A world where treating glaucoma is closer to a precise outpatient laser session than to surgery, where doctors intervene early because intervening is cheap and low-risk, and where the femtosecond laser is the default first move rather than the last resort. He has spent his career being the person who makes a strange new tool feel normal. ViaLase is the strangest tool yet, and the most ambitious version of that same job.
He has launched the tools that rewired eye care. ViaLase is the one that touches nothing.
Real-time dual imaging maps the eye's anatomy so the surgeon can see the exact landmarks inside the drainage system.
The femtosecond laser is targeted through the intact cornea - no blade, no opening, nothing physically entering the eye.
A precise ~500×200 micron channel is created in the trabecular meshwork, giving fluid a new way out and lowering pressure.
O'Neil joined the Ophthalmology Innovation Source podcast to talk through commercialization, reimbursement, and the case for treating glaucoma earlier.
▶ Watch the OIS conversation