the cost of manufacturing a gene therapy would probably exceed what most people are willing to pay for changing eye or hair color. why use gene therapy when colored contacts or hair dye work, and much more easily reversible in case you dont like it?
also, it is incredibly expensive to get a gene therapy through fda trials. there hasnt really been a "true" gene therapy approved in the us yet (excepting car-t), and the first two approved in europe were pulled from the market because they werent profitable even at a price of $1M per patient. thats why these companies go after severe rare disease -- you can charge more for saving a kids life than you could for changing hair color, and you have to charge a lot to justify the expense and incredibly high risk of developing a gene therapy. and with a rare disease, you can go to market with a 20-30 person sales force to cover all patients, whereas to market a hair or eye color thearpy youd need thousands of people calling on every hair salon and eye doctor in the country. as of now, the success rate in terms of fda approval for gene therapy is 0% -- thats an important input in financial calculations.
further complicating things is that you generally cant dose these drugs more than once bc your immune system rejects the vector after the first dose, so you have to get all your economics upfront
These may be outweighed by the potential market size of 3 billion people (a rough estimate of everyone connected to the internet). If R&D and manufacturing have a total cost of 10 billion dollars, then this reduces to $3.33 per person of the potential market size.
>cant dose these drugs more than once
This may be a showstopper for now. At a certain point, the technology should improve to allow multiple treatments so that a single individual could have red hair for a year, blonde hair for a year, black hair for a year, ...
The cool thing about growing blonde hair instead of dying hair blonde, is that nothing more needs to be done and no further treatments need to be had (unlike dyes). This does assume that the individual has enough patience for the growth process
also, it is incredibly expensive to get a gene therapy through fda trials. there hasnt really been a "true" gene therapy approved in the us yet (excepting car-t), and the first two approved in europe were pulled from the market because they werent profitable even at a price of $1M per patient. thats why these companies go after severe rare disease -- you can charge more for saving a kids life than you could for changing hair color, and you have to charge a lot to justify the expense and incredibly high risk of developing a gene therapy. and with a rare disease, you can go to market with a 20-30 person sales force to cover all patients, whereas to market a hair or eye color thearpy youd need thousands of people calling on every hair salon and eye doctor in the country. as of now, the success rate in terms of fda approval for gene therapy is 0% -- thats an important input in financial calculations.
further complicating things is that you generally cant dose these drugs more than once bc your immune system rejects the vector after the first dose, so you have to get all your economics upfront