What astrocytes, microglia and other glia actually cost

The short answer: human iPSC-derived astrocytes list between 333 and $1,081 per million cells, microglia between 333 and $1,043, and oligodendrocyte-like cells and OPCs at about 500 per million, across the four suppliers that publish a number at all.

That is a three-fold spread on nominally the same product, and almost none of it is quality. It is pack size, counting convention and currency presentation. This page separates those three effects so the comparison you make is a real one.

The price table

The media, which is not optional and is priced separately

Finding 1: the pack-size effect is larger than any vendor difference

Inside iXCells’ own catalogue, astrocytes fall from $1,081 to $722 per million, a 33 percent reduction, purely on moving from a one-million to a two-million vial. The Parkinson’s line does the same thing, $1,246 down to $833, a 33 percent reduction on the identical step.

No comparison between iXCells and Axol comes close to a 33 percent gap. If you are weighing $1,081 at iXCells against $830 at Axol, you are looking at a 23 percent difference that a single change of pack size inside one supplier would have beaten.

The practical consequence: decide the total astrocyte count for the whole programme before you compare vendors. A lab buying four one-million iXCells vials over a year spends $4,324. The same lab buying two two-million vials spends $2,888 for the same four million cells, a $1,436 saving, with no change of supplier, product, genotype or specification.

Finding 2: bit.bio is cheaper per million and not necessarily cheaper per order

bit.bio’s 333 per million is roughly a third of iXCells’ single-vial price and 40 percent of Axol’s. Three things make that comparison less clean than it looks, and all three are stated on bit.bio’s own catalogue rather than hidden:

1. It sells multi-vial packs. ioAstrocytes are a three-vial pack. If you need one million astrocytes for one experiment, the cheaper per-million product is the more expensive purchase order, 999 against $830 for a single Axol vial.
2. It quotes viable cells explicitly. “Greater than 1 × 10⁶ viable” is a stronger claim than a total count at freeze, and it is the honest basis for the per-million arithmetic. Where a competitor quotes total cells at freeze, that competitor’s per-million figure is optimistic by whatever the post-thaw loss turns out to be.
3. It publishes one number for three currencies. The catalogue price is valid as pounds, dollars or euros. We reproduce it as published rather than converting, because converting it would create a false precision. Depending on which currency you are billed in, the real dollar cost of a 999 pack varies.

The large ioMicroglia pack is the most interesting row in the whole table. Two vials of more than five million viable cells at 3,330 works out to exactly the same 333 per million as the small pack. bit.bio’s large pack buys convenience, not savings, which is the opposite of how pack pricing works at every other supplier here. If you were assuming a volume discount, there is not one, and you should ask for it rather than assume it.

Finding 3: engineered backgrounds are free; disease backgrounds are not

bit.bio’s microglia pricing separates two things that buyers routinely conflate.

Four engineered backgrounds at the wild-type price, and a flat 30 percent uplift for every disease or knockout line regardless of which gene it is. That flat structure tells you the premium is a line-maintenance charge rather than a per-target development recovery.

iXCells prices the same distinction much more gently: $1,246 for Parkinson’s sporadic and PSEN2 N141I heterozygous against $1,081 for normal, a 15 percent premium. Half of bit.bio’s.

What to do with that. If your study needs a disease line and its isogenic control, price the pair at both suppliers before choosing, because the premium structures differ by a factor of two and the answer flips depending on how many disease SKUs you need. If your study needs a CRISPR-ready or reporter background, bit.bio giving those away at the wild-type price is a genuine and unusual commercial position.

Finding 4: rodent glia are the honest budget answer for method development

iXCells rat astrocytes are $482 per 0.5 million vial and mouse astrocytes $608. On a per-million basis those are $964 and $1,216, which looks bad, and is a reminder that per-million normalisation misleads when vial sizes differ. On a per-vial basis, which is what you actually buy, rat astrocytes are the cheapest glial vial in this entire table.

Where species is genuinely not a constraint, qualifying an electrode plate, training a new technician, optimising a seeding density, testing whether a coating protocol works, running the rehearsal on a $482 rat vial rather than a $1,081 human vial is the single largest saving available in this category, and it is invisible to anyone comparing only the human SKUs.

The caveat is real and worth stating precisely. The published multielectrode array work by Lemieux and colleagues (PLoS ONE 2024) used primary human fetal astrocytes and notes that earlier work found NGN2 neurons achieved high firing rates with rodent astrocytes but not with iPSC-derived astrocytes. Rodent glia substitute for burning human vials on rehearsals, not for human glia in a fully human model.

Finding 5: microglia media costs more than most people budget

Axol prices microglia media and supplement as a standalone kit at $515 against $1,043 for the cells. The medium is roughly half the cost of the cells again.

Buying the bundle saves $234, which is 15 percent of the separate price. That is one of the few places in this market where the bundle is unambiguously the better purchase, and it is the reverse of the cardiomyocyte kit economics where the bundle carries an $865 premium.

The reason to buy the matched medium is not the $234, though. Microglial phenotype is medium-dependent to an unusual degree, these cells change state readily in response to their culture environment. Whatever medium the supplier characterised them in is the medium in which their published marker and morphology data holds. Substituting a cheaper medium introduces an uncontrolled variable into your model at the point of thaw.

What is quote-only, and what that tells you

Not every glial SKU carries a price, and the pattern of what does not is informative.

The pattern is clean: the generic product has a price and the region-specific product does not. Whole-brain rat astrocytes are $482 off the shelf. Hippocampal rat astrocytes from the same supplier are a conversation. That is not a gap in our research, the variant explicitly invites an inquiry about custom lot sizes and marker characterisation, which is a supplier telling you it makes these to order.

If your model depends on regional glial identity, budget for a quote and a lead time rather than a catalogue price, and ask what marker panel they will characterise the lot against, because the listing says that is negotiable too.

Normalising a comparison properly: a worked example

Suppose you need two million human astrocytes for a neuron co-culture, and you are choosing between the three suppliers with live storefront prices. All figures below are iXCells and Axol store API captures of 2026-09-01.

Four routes to the same experiment, spanning $1,444 to $2,162 and one currency-ambiguous number, and the cheapest per-million option delivers 50 percent more cells than you asked for. The right answer depends on whether the spare vial has a use, whether your protocol tolerates a stated minimum rather than an exact count, and which currency your purchase order is raised in.

None of that is discoverable from a price list without doing this arithmetic, which is why we publish the arithmetic.

What to confirm before ordering

• Counting convention. Exact count, stated minimum, or viable cells post-thaw. These are three different promises and only one of them is what you plate.
• Whether the price is per vial or per pack. Three of the four suppliers here sell packs.
• Which currency the catalogue number is denominated in for your purchase order, where the supplier publishes one figure for several currencies.
• The medium the supplier characterised the cells in, and whether their marker data holds in anything else. For microglia this is the most important question on the list.
• Coating requirement, and whether it matches the coating your neurons need if this is a co-culture order.
• Delivery week, aligned to the neuron order. Two cell types arriving a month apart is two experiments, not one.
• Disease-line availability, not just listing. Disease and knockout SKUs are listed continuously and stocked intermittently.
• Licence terms if anything downstream will be sold rather than published.

Where the ratio question is answered

Prices are the easy half. The harder half, how many astrocytes to seed against how many neurons, at what absolute density, on what coating, is covered with published citations on the glia sourcing guide, which sets out the 2:1 neuron-to-astrocyte ratio and 90,000-plus-45,000 per-well density used in the published MEA work, and why no supplier prints that on a product page.

Buying the right glia at the wrong ratio costs more than buying the wrong glia at the right one.

How we can help

We quote neurons and glia as a single order, because that is the only way the media, coating and delivery-week compatibility gets checked before anything is on a plane. We will normalise the cell counts to one convention so your seeding ratio is the ratio you intended, price the pack sizes against your annual requirement rather than your next experiment, and ask each supplier the question they answer readily and never publish: which medium and what ratio generated the data on their own datasheet.

Where the honest answer is that a rodent vial should carry your method development and the human vials should be saved for the real experiment, we will say that.

Send us a specification.