Alveolar lung tissue models: two routes, neither of them priced

The buying problem in this category is not that alveolar tissue is unavailable. It is that two completely different products are sold under the same phrase, neither of them carries a published price, and the specification that decides between them is buried in a single sentence about stability that no comparison table repeats.

You can buy a finished human alveolar tissue today. It arrives on an insert, it needs no instrument, and you can dose it the week it lands. You can also buy a perfused alveolar microphysiological system, but you cannot buy it as a tissue, you buy a six-figure instrument, buy plates for it, seed it with primary cells yourself, and differentiate for fourteen days before the model exists. Both are legitimate. They answer different questions, they cost amounts that differ by two orders of magnitude, and no vendor in this category publishes a number that would let you compare them.

What is purchasable today, plainly

The two-week sentence

This is the single most valuable thing on this page, so it goes near the top.

The same supplier publishes, on adjacent product pages, that its upper-airway model holds a stable homeostatic state for several months and up to a year, and that its alveolar model holds one for two weeks, with the AT1/AT2 population ratio conserved over that period.

Nothing on either page flags the difference. A group that reads the upper-airway longevity figure, forms a mental model of “these tissues last for months”, and then designs a twenty-eight-day repeat-dose alveolar study is going to lose the tissue mid-experiment. The production calendar, not the budget, then decides how long the correction takes, and the correction is a full reorder against a manufacturing slot.

There is a genuine nuance worth stating alongside it. A 2025 peer-reviewed characterisation of the same alveolar model reports a functional barrier sustained over a 30-day period, evidenced by high transepithelial electrical resistance, supported by confocal imaging of tight junctions and low permeability to Lucifer yellow, with sustained presence of both ATI and ATII cells. So the published literature and the supplier’s own commercial stability statement do not say the same thing.

That is not a contradiction to be resolved in your favour. Barrier integrity over thirty days and a conserved AT1/AT2 ratio over fourteen days are different claims about different endpoints, and only one of them is the thing the supplier will stand behind commercially. If your study needs the longer window, the correct action is to put the longer window in the RFQ as an acceptance condition and see whether the supplier will accept it in writing. Do not infer it from a paper.

The perfused alternative, and why you cannot cost it

The perfused route answers the objection the static route cannot. CN Bio’s alveolar microphysiological system seeds primary human small airway epithelial cells and endothelial cells on either side of an insert scaffold at air-liquid interface over fourteen days, forming alveolar-sac architectures with AT1 and AT2 maintained at appropriate populations. The bronchial variant does the same with primary bronchial epithelial and endothelial cells to give a pseudostratified mucociliary barrier. The supplier states that fourteen days is optimal for differentiation and that tissues have been cultured to twenty-eight days with barrier integrity, phenotype and function stable.

The plates are PDMS-free, which matters more than it sounds: PDMS absorbs small hydrophobic molecules, and for an inhalation programme dosing lipophilic compounds that absorption is a systematic error in your exposure. The format is SBS-standard and open-well, allowing liquid or aerosolised dosing, with 0.3 to 1 mL of sampling volume per well depending on plate type. The barrier plate for gut and lung is the MPS-T12.

Here is the commercial position, stated without softening: the tissue is not the product. The instrument is the product, and the tissue is something you make on it. That inverts the whole purchasing decision. The static route is an operating expense with a lead time. The perfused route is a capital purchase that gates everything afterwards.

The only instrument numbers that exist, and what they are not

CN Bio publishes no price for anything. The figures below are DERIVED from named US federal contract awards published on USAspending.gov. Each one is a real obligated amount for a real buyer on a real date, and each one is an UPPER BOUND rather than a list price, because the obligation may include shipping, installation, warranty, training or line items the award description does not state, and because federal buyers may hold negotiated schedule pricing that is unavailable to other customers.

Three cautions, all of which matter more than the numbers.

None of the three award descriptions states a plate quantity. So no per-plate or per-chip figure is derivable from any of them, and none is offered here. If somebody quotes you a per-chip cost sourced from a federal award, ask them which line item it came from.

The third record is a bundle and cannot be split. $89,934.40 buys an equipment system and four option years of preventative maintenance. Reading it as an instrument price understates the instrument and ignores the maintenance; reading it as a maintenance price is nonsense. It is useful only as evidence that a configuration existed at that total.

The spread between the first two records is larger than most people’s entire budget. $212,610.00 and $460,510.95 are both PhysioMimix multi-organ obligations, thirteen months apart, differing by a factor of more than two. That is what “standard system” versus “standard and full system” is worth, and it tells you the configuration question dominates the vendor question.

For order-of-magnitude scale on the consumable side of a comparable but different perfused platform, one genuinely derived per-plate figure does exist in our catalogue: MIMETAS OrganoPlate Graft, part 6401-400-B, at $1,163.00 per plate, DERIVED from award PIID 75N95021P00070 ($29,075 for a stated quantity of 25) and replicated exactly by PIID 75N95020P00433 ($23,260 for a stated quantity of 20). Two independent awards agreeing to the cent is unusually strong evidence for a derived figure. It is nevertheless a different vendor and a different product, and it must not be read as a CN Bio plate price.

Which route is correct for which question

That last row is the honest summary of the category. Neither route can be budgeted from public information. Everything above is an argument about fit, and the cost argument cannot be had at all until two quotes come back.

What to put in the RFQ

The difference between a comparable quote and an incomparable one in alveolar work is almost entirely about time and populations. Specify:

• Route. Finished static tissue, or a perfused system on an instrument you must already own. State which, so the quote does not silently include or exclude a capital line.
• Required usable culture window after delivery, in days, as an acceptance condition, not as a hope. Check it explicitly against the two-week alveolar stability statement rather than against anything you read about an upper-airway model.
• Cell populations required. AT1, AT2, endothelial, and whether a macrophage compartment is needed. The macrophage question turns a catalogue item into a development project.
• Whether apical surfactant secretion must be demonstrated, and by what method, on your batch, not on the supplier’s characterisation dataset.
• TEER acceptance value at release, with the measurement method and the electrode configuration. TEER numbers are not comparable across methods.
• Dosing mode, liquid, aerosol, single or repeat, and the sampling volume that mode requires per well. On the perfused route, 0.3 to 1 mL per well is the published envelope and it constrains the analytical method downstream.
• Donor health status, noting that only healthy donors are stated as available for the static alveolar model. If you need a diseased background, you are asking for a development programme.
• Number of inserts or chips and the replicate structure, aligned to a named production slot.
• Whether you want the tissue, the plate, or the study run as a service. These are three different quotes and vendors will not volunteer the distinction.

Our position

We broker this. Every tissue delivered through us is made by a named partner and labelled as partner-manufactured.

What a broker adds in this specific category is narrow and worth stating precisely. It is not price discovery, because there are no prices to discover, the useful work is forcing the stability statement, the donor constraint and the surfactant claim into writing before an order is placed, and routing the same written specification to both routes so that a static quote and a perfused quote arrive in a comparable shape. Most of the failures we see here are not procurement failures. They are a study designed on the wrong shelf life.

If your requirement genuinely fits inside two weeks with healthy donors, the static route is almost certainly correct and you should ask for a quote this week. If it does not, send us the specification and we will put the twenty-eight-day question to both routes in the same words.