Clear Aligner Market: Disruption, New Opportunities

While consumer interest in sequential clear aligners is at an all-time high, these aligners are not new to orthodontic laboratories.  Often called retainers with resets, ortho labs have actually been producing basic clear aligners since the 1980s using a labor-intensive, manual process: technicians duplicated the stone model, cut off the teeth, reset them by hand using wax, vacuum or thermoformed the retainer in thermoplastic, then repeated the process all over again to create a series of appliances.

“Not only was the process time consuming, but the retainers could only be used for small movements on anterior teeth and every time you duplicated the model you lost some accuracy,” says Christian Saurman, Co-Owner of New England Orthodontic Lab (NEO) in Andover, MA. “When Align Technology launched its Invisalign clear aligners in 1999, it revolutionized the process by using software to digitally reset the teeth—which is much faster and more accurate—and...