Cardiac microtissues: the plate costs $59.75, the finished tissue has no price at all

Before any budget question, there is a geometry question, and getting it wrong is the most expensive mistake available in this category.

A free-floating cardiac spheroid has no defined cross-section and nothing to pull against, so it cannot produce an absolute contractile force number. An anchored engineered heart tissue can. The two are sold with almost identical marketing language, they cost different amounts, and the vendor pages will not tell you which one your endpoint requires.

Scaffold-free cardiac microtissues sit between a monolayer of cardiomyocytes and a mechanically anchored engineered heart tissue. They are the correct purchase when the endpoint is beat rate, calcium handling, viability, or a structural or metabolic cardiotoxicity readout. They are the wrong purchase when the endpoint is absolute contractile force. That is why this offering sits under tissue models and the engineered heart tissue offering sits under contractile: they are not competing products and they answer different questions.

With that settled, the commercial position: no supplier surveyed publishes a price for a finished ready-to-use human cardiac microtissue. The plates are priced to the cent. The cells are priced to the cent. The finished cardiac tissue is not priced at all.

What is purchasable today, plainly

Read that table as one sentence: every input to a cardiac microtissue is public-priced, and the output is not.

The asymmetry, and what it tells you

It is worth being precise about why this category is shaped so oddly, because the shape is informative rather than accidental.

The most transparent operator in ready-to-use microtissue runs a public storefront, publishes live prices, states a guarantee of at least 95 percent of microtissues available on arrival, confirmed by an optical scan of every plate at packing, and ships against a published production schedule per model line. That is a genuinely high standard of commercial disclosure, and it is a useful reference for what “ready to use” ought to mean.

But the priced ready-to-use lines are liver. The cardiac configuration is not sold at a published price.

So the honest reading is not that the vendor is being opaque about cardiac. It is that liver microtissue is a manufactured product with a production schedule and cardiac microtissue, from the same class of supplier, is not yet one. The $44.58 per liver microtissue figure, cells and medium included, on a 96-plate, is the useful thing to carry into a cardiac conversation, not as a price but as evidence of what a mature ready-to-use microtissue line looks like when it exists.

One further data point, and it needs a label. A US federal award, PIID 75N95022P00297 dated 2022-06-29 at $63,932.00, is described as assessing drug cardiac safety with a 3D engineered cardiac muscle tissue contractility assay platform. That is a service obligation for a named engagement, not a product price, and no quantity is stated in the record, so nothing per-unit is derivable from it. It tells you the order of magnitude at which a cardiac contractility study gets contracted. It tells you nothing about what a microtissue costs.

The self-forming route, costed from public parts

If you accept that the finished cardiac tissue is unpriced, the alternative is to form them yourself. Unusually for this site, that route can be costed exactly, because every component is a live list price.

The plasticware is not the cost. The cells are. At $0.62 per well for the 20-pack plate, the consumable contribution to a 96-microtissue experiment is under sixty dollars. Cardiomyocyte cost at EUR 750.00 per million dominates by an order of magnitude, and it scales directly with how many cells each microtissue needs, which is set by the microtissue diameter you specify.

That is the practical lever in this category: diameter drives cell count drives cost. It is decided at plate selection and cannot be renegotiated afterwards.

Composition: what the literature says you may need

A microtissue of pure cardiomyocytes is not a model of myocardium, and whether that matters depends entirely on your endpoint.

Cardiac spheroids co-culturing human primary or iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells and fibroblasts at ratios approximating those present in vivo have been reported to give cellular organisation, extracellular matrix and a microvascular network mimicking human heart tissue. In that work, doxorubicin cytotoxicity was dose-dependent and was inhibited both by the nitric oxide synthase inhibitor L-NIO and by genetic inhibition of endothelial NOS, implicating peroxynitrous acid as a key damaging agent.

That result is worth sitting with, because of what it implies commercially. The mechanism was endothelial. A monoculture cardiomyocyte spheroid would have had no endothelium in which to detect it. If your compound’s cardiac liability runs through the vasculature or the stroma, a cardiomyocyte-only microtissue will give you a clean, reproducible, wrong answer.

So co-culture composition belongs in the specification, with the ratio stated, not left as a vendor default.

The force question, settled

The reason this page keeps returning to geometry is that the failure it causes is silent.

Microcantilever platforms that constrain contraction and report force in real time have been reported for arrays of cardiac microtissues, with the finding that both the dynamic force of contraction and the basal static tension increase with boundary or matrix rigidity. Separately, strip-format force-generating engineered heart tissue from human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes has been characterised across 26 concentration-response curves, replicating canonical responses to inotropic and pharmacological modulators with high precision.

Both of those require an anchored geometry. Neither is achievable in a free-floating spheroid, because force requires something to pull against and a cross-section to normalise by.

If any row in the bottom half of that table is your endpoint, stop reading this page and go to the cardiac microtissue on posts and engineered heart tissue coverage instead. That redirection is more valuable to you than anything else here.

What to put in the RFQ

• Endpoint class first, because it decides the geometry: unanchored microtissue for beat rate, calcium and viability; anchored construct for absolute force. Write the endpoint down before the format.
• Co-culture composition, cardiomyocytes alone, or with fibroblasts and endothelial cells, and the ratio, with a reason.
• Cell source and line, and whether an isogenic disease variant or control is required.
• Number of microtissues, plate format and replicate structure.
• Microtissue diameter and a uniformity specification. Diameter sets cell count and therefore cost, and uniformity is what the microwell plasticware exists to deliver.
• Required functional lifetime in culture after arrival, stated in days.
• Medium configuration, and whether it is included. On the priced liver lines medium is bundled; do not assume that for a quoted cardiac line.
• Availability-on-arrival guarantee, if the supplier offers one, and what happens if it is missed.
• Delivery date aligned to the supplier’s production schedule, not to your calendar. Production cadence, not budget, is what determines when a correction is possible.
• Whether you want finished tissue, a self-forming kit, or the study run as a service. Three different quotes.

Our position

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

The most useful work in this category happens before any money moves, and it is not price negotiation. It is making the geometry decision explicitly and in writing, because a group that buys the unanchored format for a contractility programme discovers the problem only after the tissue arrives, and at that point the production calendar decides how long the correction takes.

After that, the arithmetic is straightforward and mostly public: plates at $59.75, cells at EUR 750.00 per million, and a quote-gated finished tissue that has to justify itself against both. Send us the endpoint and we will tell you which format it requires before quoting anything.