Upon sifting through the ICX website, I found an interesting quote:
Existing conventional treatments, involving the transplant of whole hairs, represent the only means of regenerating bald or thinning areas. This is a highly costly ($10,000 - $20,000) specialist procedure. Extensive tissue is required, obtained by the removal of a large section of scalp leaving a significant scar at the donor site. Individual follicles are removed from the dissected scalp by specialised technicians and then individually re-implanted into surgical incisions created in the scalp. This procedure usually takes place during two, eight-hour implant sessions performed under a local anaesthetic. A lengthy recovery period may be required during which time the patient may suffer from pain, bleeding and swelling of the scalp. In general the cosmetic effect is excellent, however in all cases, the quality of outcome is limited by the amount of donor hair available. Moreover, many individuals electing to undergo this procedure do not progress to transplant surgery as they have insufficient transplantable hair follicles to benefit from the technique as between 2,000 - 5,000 follicles are often needed for this procedure.
The ICX-TRC procedure is significantly less problematic than conventional hair transplants. In terms of the amount of tissue taken from the patient, only a small sample of approximately 120 follicles is needed. As a consequence, trauma suffered by the patient during the procedure may be dramatically reduced. Furthermore, as dermal papilla (DP)cells can be derived from a very small area of hair-bearing scalp, a much higher population of patients will be able to benefit from ICX-TRC than conventional transplantation. Superficial injection of cultured cells into the scalp causes far less tissue damage than implanting multiple hair follicles and is a considerably simpler, shorter and less painful process.
There are two important implications we can derive from this:
A) ICX considers procedures above $10,000 to be “highly costly” = and we can reasonably infer that in emphasizing this point they expect their procedure to be comparatively better (i.e. cheaper, possibly by a significant factor).
B) the procedure will not require specialists trained to the extent convential hair transplantation requires, meaning: 1 - TRC technicians may be reasonably expected to be in greater supply (more procedures will be available and provided) 2) the cost to employ these technicians may be significantly lower
Thus, we can very reasonably conclude that the TRC procedure is (at least at present) expected to be less than $10,000, possibly by a very significant amount.