No. A product that would exist only in Asia and, in its present state, only maintains hair for a few months and requires a biopsy is not viable. Especially not when a pill is on the market that can sustain hair for many years, if not indefinitely.
"but muuuuh" No. You mistake the desperation of certain demographics willingness to pay for anything with "viability".
First off, there is nothing on paper (market research) showing that enough of the population would be willing/able to pay for this. Secondly, even if they did, it doesn't matter anyway; they cannot continuously administer the treatment and the cost of doing so would far exceed finasteride, transplants, etc. in a pretty short amount of time.
Consider that Aderans' technology, a decade ago, was able to maintain hair indefinitely and still was scrapped.
The average consumers of hair transplants are not as savvy as a pessimistic, forum-dwelling autist like yourself. It’s all about how you sell the product. You’d have these hair transplant doctors recommending it along with the transplant. Again, I point you to the widespread use of PRP in the hair transplant industry. The fact is most people trust doctors and their recommendations, and derms/cosmetics in particular make a killing off of that trust. They’d love to sell a patient on a $1500 dollar add-on procedure even if in reality that patient could get the same results from a 10 dollar finasteride prescription.
Plus, it does fit within the current treatment paradigm of “throwing everything at it.” Doctors overwhelmingly agree that maintaining your current hair is the best long-term treatment for this disease. Even with the current data that we have, if you have the means, it would make sense to use this therapy along with finasteride/min.
It would be a great drug to partner or sell to a niche derm player, somebody like Dermira or Bausch that already has a national sales force targeting the same doctors. It’d cost very little to market with the sales infrastructure already in place and it’s very easy to see it bringing in 50-100 million annually.
Its not the paradigm shifting drug we want as patients, but its definitely not dead like you want to make it out to be. They’re at least going to try to optimize it in a phase 2b. The other thing to mention here is that phase 3 derm trials are not that expensive, or at least they don’t have to be. If they were to get this on the market in Japan and continue to build out the safety profile, it would be a relatively low financial bar to get it to NDA in the US.
