Well, thanks everybody for joining. Sight Sciences, we're a publicly traded ophthalmic medical device company. We are developing transformative interventional technologies that help eye care providers procedurally elevate the standard of care. We've developed two leading technologies in two major categories in eye care: glaucoma and dry eye disease. Glaucoma is the world's leading cause of irreversible blindness. It's a huge problem in eye care. Dry eye disease, in terms of prevalence, it's one of the most common reasons for a visit to an eye care provider. It's also a major problem in eye care, and it's getting worse with increased screen time, with age, hormone-related, screen-related staring. The primary problem in dry eye is actually due to diseased Meibomian glands in the eyelids, preventing the tear layer from being protected with a lipid oil layer.
So we have a procedure that helps fortify that lipid layer, treating the signs and symptoms of dry eye disease. On the glaucoma side, our technology also does something similar in that it treats the underlying cause of disease, the OMNI Surgical System, helps reduce pressure by addressing the diseased outflow anatomy in glaucoma. We're commercial stage. Our lead product is the OMNI Surgical System, which is clinically speaking an efficacy leader in the category. It's a very comprehensive treatment. It allows the surgeon, through a single, bloodless, sutureless, clear corneal incision, to access the entire diseased outflow anatomy in the eye and treat it, addressing all three sources of resistance in the outflow pathway: the trabecular meshwork, Schlemm's canal, and the collector channels. So it's a very comprehensive treatment. We are competing today in the existing MIGS market.
It's combination cataract MIGS, so glaucoma surgery performed at the time of cataract surgery. That's estimated to be about a billion-dollar market opportunity. We launched Omni in 2018. We've been growing every year nicely since. That's kind of a take-share market opportunity. And then there's also a much larger market expanding opportunity called standalone surgical glaucoma. That's estimated to be a $5 billion market opportunity. It's earlier stage. We're leading the way in terms of market development. And the thesis is, today, glaucoma for standalone glaucoma patients, they're typically treated with one medication. Maybe the doctor, the pressure's not controlled. They'll add a second medication, maybe do a laser in the office. Pressure's still not controlled. And at that point, they have to think, do I offer this patient a third medication? Do I refer them out to the glaucoma specialist for highly invasive surgery?
Well, both of those options are suboptimal, but that's today's standard of care. And what needs to happen when that patient's on one med or two meds and their pressure's uncontrolled, there needs to be a less invasive, minimally invasive, yet highly effective, safe procedure with reproducible outcomes like Omni that is then offered to the patient. So that's the market expansion opportunity, this $5 billion TAM standalone glaucoma with Omni. We have a broad FDA label based on our compelling clinical evidence in both combination cataract glaucoma surgery as well as standalone glaucoma surgery. Our label allows us to educate the surgeon community on intervening surgically earlier and effectively both in combo cataract as well as standalone. Ali can talk about our growth profile shortly in glaucoma. But again, there's a take-share opportunity and then a market expanding opportunity in standalone.
On the dry eye side of our business, today, it's another huge category, multibillion-dollar category, millions of patients diagnosed with dry eye disease. Historically, the medical community believed most dry eye had to be due to aqueous deficiency. A patient would have symptoms and signs of dry eye disease because they must not be producing enough tears. Well, in reality, the vast majority of dry eye patients produce plenty of tears. The problem is their tears are evaporating too quickly. So they're produced, and they evaporate almost immediately from the surface of the eye. And the reason why tears evaporate prematurely is due to a compromised outermost lipid layer. It's that outer oil layer that helps keep that aqueous, the thicker aqueous layer around on the tears for a longer period of time. That protects the cornea. That helps alleviate the signs and symptoms of dry eye disease.
So it's estimated 86% of this massive category of 15-20 million diagnosed dry eye patients in the US. It's estimated that 86% of them suffer primarily from the evaporative form of dry eye disease. And that's what our technology, the tear care technology, it's an interventional technology, an interventional procedure. It's in office. It helps alleviate the obstructions within the oil-producing glands within your eyelids, the Meibomian glands. It helps melt those obstructions, clear them, evacuate them effectively and comprehensively, allowing the patient's own underlying anatomy to resume the production of good liquid oil so that with every blink the Meibomian glands, there's force applied to the Meibomian glands. Good liquid oil is expressed from those glands.
The upper lid, when you open your eyes following at the end of the blink, it pulls a nice, clear oil layer over the tear, keeping those tears around for much longer. We've proven the technology's clinical utility. Doctors love to use it. Ophthalmologists love it. Optometrists love it. Patients benefit from it immediately, near-term, mid-term, and long-term outcomes. We've rolled it out today in the cash pay world, and patients are paying. However, this needs to be reimbursed. Patients need to have access to an interventional procedure that addresses their root underlying cause of dry eye disease. And so we set out many, many years ago to pioneer a strategy to create market access, to create patient access to interventional eyelid procedures. We are now proud of our RCT that we've completed. At least we've completed phase two out of a three-phase RCT.
Phase one was six months. We went head-to-head, TearCare interventional procedure against the market-leading dry eye therapeutic on record. That's Allergan's Restasis, dry eye drop, which peaked at $1.5 billion in sales. We went head-to-head with Restasis. We talked to payers before we designed this protocol, and we said, "Patients need to have access to this technology and to this procedure. What clinical data do you need to see so that if we're successful in this clinical trial, you'll create coverage and provide access for patients to this technology and procedure?" Well, they said, "We'd like to see you randomize, ideally, against what we know very well, the market-leading dry eye therapeutic." That was Restasis. "Ideally, we'd like you to show superiority." That was the first goal of the study. And the second is also show us durability of treatment effect.
So, how long does the TearCare treatment last? If we decide to cover it, how many patients, how many treatments will we be paying for per year? Is it one treatment a year, two treatments a year, more than that? We've done over 50,000 cases in the cash pay world, and we've seen how effective the technology and procedure is for patients. We've also seen how long it lasts. So our experience in the market on a larger scale gave us the confidence to do this ambitious RCT, going head-to-head against twice daily Restasis and its oil emulsion that it's delivered in, twice daily for six months straight. We had two TearCare treatments randomized against twice daily Restasis for six months straight, compliant. And we had to make sure that the patients were compliant.
We published the six-month results not long ago showing superiority on our primary signs endpoint of tear breakup time. We also showed clinically and statistically significant improvements in every single sign and every single symptom measured at every single time point in the study. That's through six months; it's published. We're about to publish our 12-month study where we crossed over all of the Restasis patients. This is a 340-patient study, randomized one-to-one, about 170 patients in each arm. We crossed over the 170 Restasis patients to get a single TearCare treatment at six months. Then we saw how they were doing at 12 months. Soon that will be published. At a high level, it was presented at the recent ASCRS conference. We showed further improvement when patients, they've improved from six months of Restasis.
That's the new baseline for the 12-month phase two part of the study. We showed further improvement, pulling the patients off Restasis, giving them a single TearCare treatment, all signs and symptoms further improved. So that's very, very compelling data to payers. As you can imagine, we're showing not only if you're starting off treatment naive and you do TearCare or Restasis, how the TearCare patients do better. We also showed for all of those patients today who were on prescription Rx, if you offer them instead a TearCare treatment, how would they do? So those are both very important data points for payers. We are happy that we are now engaging with payers, having coverage discussions. We've stated publicly that we would expect coverage policy decisions, assuming we're successful.
We have a lot of confidence in, based on the SAHARA RCT, that we would see coverage policies in the 2025 time frame and beyond. So there's three great opportunities here and now today: continue to grow Omni in combination with cataract surgery as one of the leading efficacy players in MIGS. Continue to develop the much larger standalone MIGS market with Omni, which we're doing. It's growing. And lastly, develop the MGD, the interventional MGD procedure market with TearCare based on the SAHARA RCT and eventual coverage. Behind that, we have a rich pipeline of technologies. Everything we've developed, Omni, TearCare, was designed in-house internally. We've got a very strong capability and innovation. We've got a very nice pipeline that we're looking forward to talking about in due course also in the glaucoma and dry eye categories. So that's a snapshot of Sight Sciences.
Ali, do you want to talk about financial performance?
Sure. Yeah. So we started the year with a great start, and we do expect, looking into the second quarter now, that we'll have low double-digit growth sequentially from the first quarter. And then really looking at the back half of the year, we do expect to be double-digit growers year-over-year for the second half. So we're very proud of the revenue growth that we're seeing in the business and returning to that growth profile over time. And we do expect to continue that going into 2025 as well. As Paul mentioned, these are two very large, incredible opportunities for us on both surgical glaucoma and dry eye. Dry eye is really foundational this year in terms of building that market access function.
So we don't expect growth this year in that business, but we do expect in 2025 to really start seeing accelerated growth in that business. When we look at our gross margin profile, we have very healthy gross margins in the 85% range. We expect that to continue. It's something we're very proud of in our business, and we've continued to be able to invest in our innovation, in our commercial strategy while also having a focus on being more cost-efficient and making sure that we use our capital in the right way. So we ended the first quarter with about $127 million of cash. We continue to be diligent with that, and we expect to have the appropriate capital in order to reach our objectives without having to raise additional equity capital.
So we think we're in a very solid place from a financial perspective with lots of huge opportunities for us in the future to grow our revenue and, of course, grow our total business. So really exciting time for us with both the standalone market opportunity on the surgical glaucoma as well as the market access activities on the dry eye side. And we look forward to continuing to keep all of our investors updated on our progress as we move forward.
And that is perfect timing. 20 seconds for questions. Well, thank you all for joining us today. Look forward to seeing some of you in the one-on-ones. Thank you. Thank you.