Sourcing cells, tissue and devices

The short answer: cryopreserved cells have public prices and ship in one to three weeks. Everything else is a quote. Living tissue models ship on a weekly production calendar with no published price. Contractile muscle, neuromuscular junctions and delivered active neural cultures are not catalogue items anywhere — they are integration projects that take weeks and cross three or more suppliers.

We are a sourcing intermediary. We do not manufacture. Every physical item we deliver is made by a named partner and labelled as such. What we sell is source selection, comparable quotes, and one purchase order instead of six.

The category matrix

Why the split falls where it does

The line between catalogue and RFQ is not a line between easy and hard. It is a line between products that survive freezing and products that do not.

A cryovial of neurons can be manufactured in a batch, characterised, frozen, held in inventory and sold to a stranger a year later. That supports a price list, a SKU number and a shopping cart. Several suppliers run exactly that model, and the prices are genuinely public — you can read them off a storefront without speaking to anyone.

A living tissue cannot be held in inventory. It is grown to a maturation window and shipped inside it. The best-run supplier in this category ships every Monday, delivers Tuesday morning by courier, and gives the tissue a four-day shelf life including transit. That is a production calendar, not a warehouse, and it is why living-tissue vendors quote rather than list. The constraint is not secrecy. It is that the answer to “how much and when” depends on which production slot you can get into.

Contractile muscle is the third case, and it is the one worth understanding before you spend anything.

The gap that defines this business

Across roughly thirty organisations we surveyed, not one lists a finished muscle construct against a published force acceptance criterion. That is a narrower claim than it sounds, and it is narrower than an earlier version of this page made it. You can buy finished contractile tissue: myriamed sells myrTissue-Skeletal and myrTissue-Cardio off a public storefront at €1,400 for one tissue, €5,400 for five and €8,000 for twelve, ambient shipping, certificate of analysis per batch, 7–11 weeks. What no supplier publishes is a twitch or tetanic force the tissue is released against. The market splits three ways:

• Epithelial, spheroid and barrier tissue is a shipped finished good. Static, non-contractile, no mechanical attachment, fixed format. Several vendors do this well and have done for two decades.
• Contractile muscle is available finished from one supplier, and as empty plasticware from several. If you cast your own you buy the mould, then supply the cells, the hydrogel, the media, the stimulation and the skill. See engineered skeletal muscle tissue and engineered heart tissue for both routes with the prices attached.
• A construct specified to a force number is still nobody’s catalogue item. There is a price to compare now, but no acceptance criterion to enforce, which is the thing an engineering buyer actually wants to write into a purchase order.

This is not a science problem. The published force numbers from a commercial casting platform sit comfortably inside what most buyers ask for. It is a commercial gap: the cells, the mould, the casting, the stimulation and the force test each exist as a purchasable capability, held by five or six separate companies, none of which will integrate them and hand you the object.

Our engineered skeletal muscle page sets out who sells what, with the real numbers, and what it costs to do it yourself instead.

What “lead time” actually means per category

Lead time is the most commonly misread number on a supplier page, because three different clocks get called the same thing.

Cells. Lead time means picking and shipping from an existing lot. If the lot exists, it is days. If it does not, you are waiting on a production run, and disease-mutant lines are where this bites — a line can be listed on a website and still be months out. Isogenic controls are stocked and priced separately by every supplier we checked, which is how buyers routinely end up holding a mutant line with no matched control.

Living tissue models. Lead time means the next available production slot plus transit. Ordering on Tuesday does not save you a week if shipping happens on Mondays.

Devices. Stocked devices ship like cells. Custom fabrication has a tooling step in front of it, and that step — not the parts — dominates both cost and schedule on a first article.

Contract work. Lead time means the programme duration. Published phase timings from one established provider give a useful envelope: directed differentiation four to eight weeks, a 3D phenotyping study three to five weeks, CRISPR line editing eight to sixteen weeks. Anyone quoting a custom tissue in under a month is quoting something other than what you asked for.

Where a broker actually adds value

Not everywhere. Three honest cases:

We add nothing when you know the SKU, the supplier has it on a public storefront, and you have a purchasing account. Buy it directly. The reference case is a single vial of standard cortical neurons — that is a checkout, not a sourcing problem.

We add something when the same nominal product is priced by four suppliers in incompatible units with different media requirements and different disease-line coverage, and nobody publishes a side-by-side. Normalising that comparison is real work, and it is why we maintain the price-per-million analysis and the supplier directory.

We add most when the thing you want is an integration across suppliers who each hold one piece, none of whom will own the whole result. Muscle constructs, NMJ models and delivered active neural cultures are all this shape. Someone has to write the specification, send it to several parties, normalise the answers, and hold an acceptance criterion. That is the job.

What we need from you to quote

A quote is only comparable if every supplier answered the same question. The specification fields that actually change the answer:

• Cell type and subtype, including genotype and whether you need a matched isogenic control.
• Quantity in the units you will use — viable cells post-thaw, not total cells at freeze.
• Format — vial, plate, coverslip, MEA plate, 3D construct.
• Whether media and coating are included or you supply your own.
• Species constraint, if any. Rodent equivalents are substantially cheaper and are the right answer more often than people expect.
• Licence class — research use only, or the right to use derivatives commercially. This is the field that does not appear on any price list and is the one that gates commercial projects.
• Acceptance criteria, if you want any. Post-thaw viability, purity against named markers, network activity, twitch force. A specification without an acceptance criterion is a wish.
• Required delivery date, and whether you can accept a production-slot constraint.

Provenance rules we hold ourselves to

Every listing we publish carries one of four labels, and in the current phase two of them are structurally unused because we hold no inventory and operate no production:

• In stock — we hold it. Never used today.
• Made by Wetware World — we manufactured it. Never used today.
• Partner manufactured — a named supplier made it; we sourced, consolidated and delivered it.
• Custom RFQ — no supplier advertises this as a purchasable item; it is quoted as a project.

If a page ever claims we made something we brokered, that is a defect, not marketing. The catalogue shows the provenance label on every line.

Start here

• Buying neurons: human iPSC-derived cortical neurons, the supplier directory, and suppliers compared head-to-head.
• Buying the other half of a neural culture: iPSC astrocytes, microglia and glia, which carries the neuron-to-astrocyte ratios the MEA protocols actually specify, and iPSC-derived motor neurons if the target is the neuromuscular route.
• Doing electrophysiology: MEA-ready neurons, which explains why that phrase means nothing until you check four specific things.
• Building muscle: human skeletal myoblasts then engineered skeletal muscle tissue, and 3D muscle culture devices for the mould you cast it in.
• Cardiac work: iPSC cardiomyocytes for the cells, or engineered heart tissue if you would rather buy the construct than build it.
• Buying tissue models: what you can actually buy, reconstructed human epidermis, liver microtissues and spheroids, and RhE models compared.

If your specification does not fit any of those, send it to us. We will tell you whether it is a catalogue purchase you should make yourself, or a genuine sourcing problem worth paying someone to solve.