You’ve taken a very small slice of the total workflow to develop cas9 crispr edits. Yes some components are “not crazy expensive”, but that’s not therapeutic production levels. And no sequencing. And no bioinformatics. And then zero tissue targeting/ delivery or safety studies.
So $5k is a massive stretch. I do think costs are coming down. But don’t want to oversell current state of “garage hacking” either.
Sequencing all of the interesting parts of the human genome is $300-$400 and a few weeks wait.
The bioinformatics to find a simple mutation and design a crispr fix or one of the other gene therapy methods is about 1 grad student week.
I am talking about garage hacking and there sure are a bunch of risks and chances of ineffective treatments, but researchers used to take a lot more risks and I can see folks with degenerative, terminal, or otherwise very severe conditions being happy to say fuck it let's try something.
And with an appetite for risk and a fuck it attitude, you can try something for less than the cost of a used toyota.
And as mainstream treatments develop, custom gene editing as a fully safe therapy option is going to become common.
So $5k is a massive stretch. I do think costs are coming down. But don’t want to oversell current state of “garage hacking” either.