The master price index

We looked for an aggregated price list for engineered living components and did not find one. Vendors publish list prices in isolation, market-research firms paywall summaries, and most of the category prices by quote.

This is every figure we have verified, in one table, with the source and the observation date for each. Nothing on this page is a quotation, and every row can be checked against the link beside it.

How to read this index

Every row carries a basis flag. They are not equivalent and should not be compared as if they were.

• List, a published list price read from a live vendor storefront or product page.
• Rate card, a published institutional or core-facility rate, usually restricted to an eligible customer class.
• Derived, calculated by dividing a public procurement record’s obligated amount by the quantity stated in the same record. A real transaction price for that buyer on that date, but the obligation may include shipping or other items, so treat it as an upper bound.
• Stated unit, a unit price stated explicitly in a published supplier document such as an order confirmation.
• Quote only, we checked and no price is published.

Cells

Media and supplements

Tissue models and finished tissue

Plates, chips and culture devices

Instruments and platforms

Note on the Emulate range. Two federal awards describing an identical configuration, two Zoe CM2 modules and two Orb hubs, are obligated at $218,100 and $146,915 thirteen months apart, a 48 percent difference. We publish the envelope and decline to derive a per-module price. The full working is on organ-on-chip platform costs.

QC, characterisation and testing

Services: differentiation, banking, editing

Labour, facility and consulting rates

Devices, fabrication and native tissue

Shipping, cold chain and logistics

What this index tells you about the market

1. Pack size beats vendor choice, consistently. BPS cardiomyocytes fall 43 percent from $405 to $230 per million between a 1M and a 5M vial. BrainXell neurons fall 46 percent. iXCells astrocytes fall 33 percent. myriamed engineered muscle falls from EUR 1,400 to EUR 667 per tissue between one and twelve. No cross-vendor comparison in this index is worth as much as getting the pack size right inside one.

2. Genotype is the second-largest driver. iXCells motor neurons go from $739 normal to $1,537 for SOD1 A4V homozygous, 108 percent. bit.bio charges a flat 30 percent for any disease microglia line while giving away CRISPR and reporter backgrounds at the wild-type price.

3. The same named assay varies three-fold between providers. A G-band karyotype is $450 at Baylor, $917.73 at the Gates Center and $1,307 at Salk’s external for-profit rate. Choosing the provider matters more than qualifying for the tier.

4. Customer class is worth 1.25× to 5.5×. Salk applies a flat 1.25× to every line. UPenn applies 2.25×. Coriell’s grantee-to-commercial spread on a cell culture is 5.47×. And MD Anderson’s shipping fee is 8× for non-academic buyers. Full detail on academic versus commercial pricing.

5. Instruments are quote-only everywhere, and procurement records are the only public data. No MEA or organ-chip vendor publishes an instrument or plate price. Everything in the instrument table above came from public contract awards, and one platform’s records vary 48 percent for an identically described configuration.

6. The quote-only wall sits in a consistent place. Cells, plasticware and research-grade services have prices. GMP anything, contract differentiation, custom fabrication, human tissue procurement and every instrument do not. The boundary is regulation and bespokeness, and it is the same at every supplier.

The spokes

• iPSC neuron prices per million cells, four suppliers normalised, and why the counting conventions make it harder than it looks.
• iPSC cardiomyocyte prices compared, three suppliers live, the $865 flat kit premium isolated, and what each publishes on purity.
• Astrocyte and glia pricing, astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes and OPCs, the media that comes attached, and the regional variants that are quote-only.
• MEA plate and consumable costs, the recurring bill nobody budgets, derived from procurement records because no vendor publishes.
• Organ-on-chip platform costs, instrument, consumable and per-well economics, plus the measured distributor markup.
• The cost of a failed batch, a fully transparent model of what a failure destroys in cells, labour, instrument time and schedule.
• Academic versus commercial pricing, every published tier structure with the measured multiplier.
• Shipping and cold chain costs, dry ice, dry shippers, handling fees, permits and what drives the number.
• Buy or differentiate?, the full total-cost-of-ownership model with breakeven by batches per year.
• Cell banking service costs, MCB, WCB and RUO banking, and where the quote-only wall sits.
• Cell QC testing costs, STR, mycoplasma, sterility, karyotype and endotoxin by assay, method and provider.
• Reconstructed human epidermis pricing, the verified specification, and the two quote-only market leaders.
• Custom microfluidic fabrication costs, NRE against per-part across volume tiers of 1, 10, 100 and 1,000.

Verification policy

Every figure carries a source and an observation date. A price captured on 2026-09-01 is accurate as of 2026-09-01 and nothing more, and we say so rather than presenting a stale number as current.

Where a figure came from a live store API or product page, we say list. Where a page subsequently blocked automated re-fetch, we treat the figure as accurate at capture rather than continuously verified. Where a supplier publishes a “from” price on a configurable product, we carry the “from” wording rather than silently converting it to a flat price. Where we calculated a unit price from a procurement record, we say derived and show the quantity the calculation used.

A band here tells you what to expect on the first call. Your actual price comes back with the quote.

This index is what we run sourcing against. We take a specification, put it to suppliers who can actually meet it, and normalise what comes back.

How we can help

If you have a specification, we will put it to the suppliers that can meet it, normalise the responses to a common unit, and show you where the quoted numbers sit against the published ones above, including when the honest answer is that a catalogue item is cheaper than anything we could broker for you.

Send us a specification and we will come back with sourced, comparable numbers.