Engineered heart tissue: who sells the plate, who sells the tissue, who sells the data

The short answer: you can buy a finished, living human engineered heart tissue today from myriamed at €1,400 for a single tissue, €5,400 for five and €8,000 for twelve, on a six-to-eight-week order-related manufacturing lead time, shipped at ambient temperature with a certificate of analysis. That is the only public per-unit price for a finished contractile human cardiac tissue we have found.

Everything else in this category is instrument-coupled, and that is the honest headline. Curi Bio, DiNABIOS and the rest sell you a measurement platform plus consumables, or they sell you a study. The tissue is a step in their workflow, not the product.

What each supplier is actually selling

The one genuine finished-tissue product, and what it costs

myriamed’s myrTissue-Cardio is worth setting out carefully because it is unusual.

What it is. Engineered myocardium constructed from human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes and fibroblasts, from the W001 wild-type line, supplied live. The supplier’s stated differentiator is morphological maturity: specifically aligned sarcomeres, increasingly physiologically relevant resting membrane potentials, and synchronised rhythmic contractions, with that structural and functional integrity maintained for weeks. The underlying method is published — Tiburcy and colleagues in Circulation, 2017 — which is a meaningfully stronger evidence position than a datasheet claim.

How it arrives. Shipped at ambient temperature for immediate use after 24 hours of recovery in appropriate culture medium at 37 °C. Each released batch carries a certificate of analysis.

Ambient shipping is the operationally interesting part. No dry ice, no dry shipper, no cold-chain receiving procedure. Against a reconstructed epidermis product shipped at 4 °C with a four-day shelf life including transit, this is a much less fragile logistics problem. The 24-hour recovery step is the trade, and it means the tissue is not usable on the day it lands.

The price ladder.

Buying twelve rather than one takes the unit cost down by 52 percent. That is a larger volume effect than most cell products show, and it reflects the fact that a manufacturing run has a fixed setup cost regardless of how many tissues come off it.

The lead time is the constraint. Six to eight weeks of order-related manufacturing for cardiac tissue — and seven to eleven weeks for the skeletal and neuronal equivalents in the same range. This is made to order. There is no inventory. If your grant milestone is in five weeks, this product cannot help you, and no amount of expediting changes a differentiation and maturation schedule.

What you are buying at €667 to €1,400 per tissue. Roughly: cardiomyocytes, fibroblasts, matrix, several weeks of skilled culture, casting, maturation, quality release and shipping. myriamed sells its own cardiomyocytes at €750 per million, which frames the arithmetic — a single tissue costs about two vials of the input cells. Whether that is good value depends entirely on whether your lab could run the culture at all.

Casting it yourself: the plate route

If you have cell culture capability and time, both plate vendors sell you a mould.

myriamed myrPlate. 48-well SBS-format plates, each well with two flexible poles (stretchers) supporting the tissue in a ring format under defined mechanical load. Six stiffness grades from TM4-MED to TM9-MED, with TM5-MED as the recommended standard. Stretchers contain a fluorescent dye so force can be traced optically. €270 per plate, €2,200 for ten — so about €5.60 per well at the ten-plate price.

The Gradient plate at €330 is the smartest thing in this catalogue and is easy to overlook. It carries one row of each stiffness from soft to hard, and myriamed explicitly recommends it to first-time users to determine optimal conditions. Buying one gradient plate before buying ten uniform plates costs €330 and saves you from casting an entire experiment at the wrong stiffness. Post and stretcher stiffness is not a nuisance parameter — in published engineered muscle work on a comparable platform, two of five tested stiffnesses bent so far under passive tension that active contraction could not be resolved at all.

Curi Bio Mantarray. A 24-well casting plate with paired flexible posts, marketed with a claimed greater-than-95-percent tissue formation success rate, plus a Stimulation Kit lid giving independent per-well stimulation protocols for acute and long-term pacing. Mini Plates reduce tissue volume by up to 60 percent and use up to 50 percent fewer cells while stated to preserve contractile data quality. Every SKU is request-a-quote.

The economics of casting. A myrPlate at €270 covering 48 wells is cheap. What is not cheap is what goes in it. At iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte prices of roughly €750 to $613 per million and a typical engineered tissue consuming on the order of a million cells or so depending on format, the cell input dominates the consumable cost by a wide margin. Curi Bio’s Mini Plate proposition — half the cells per tissue — is therefore a much bigger economic lever than the plate price, and it is the right thing to ask about first.

Add several weeks of skilled culture labour per run, media, matrix, a stimulation system if you want maturation, and an imaging or measurement setup. A first EHT experiment is a few-hundred-euro plate inside a several-thousand-euro experiment.

Force readout: three technologies, three commitments

This is where the instrument lock-in question actually lives.

Optical, with your own imaging (myriamed). Stretchers carry a fluorescent dye; you image them, track deflection and convert to force through known stiffness. Advantages: no proprietary instrument, works with the microscope you own, plates are SBS format, cheap. Disadvantages: you characterise or trust the stiffness figure, throughput is limited by imaging time, and long-term recording inside an incubator needs a setup that tolerates it. myriamed also sells its own myrImager for labs that want the turnkey version.

Magnetic sensing (Curi Bio Mantarray). A magnet embedded in each flexible post tip sits above giant magnetoresistive sensors; tissue contraction deflects the post, moving the magnet, producing a voltage change that converts to force. Advantages: automated, real-time, all 24 wells in parallel, label-free, and reproducible in a way manual tracking is not. Automatically extracted metrics include contractile force, force-frequency, contraction and relaxation rates, time to peak twitch, maximal twitch amplitude, full width at half max, beat period and frequency, and beating frequency irregularity. Disadvantages: you buy the instrument and are then committed to its consumables, all of which are quote-only.

Video-optical (DiNABIOS DiNAQUBE). Sterile video-optical measurement completing in 90 seconds, analysing up to 24 EHTs in parallel, with automated tissue recognition, marketed for long-term non-invasive studies and paired with a web-based analytics layer. Advantages: sterile and non-invasive, so the same tissues can be measured repeatedly over a long study; the analytics pipeline is part of the product. Disadvantages: same instrument commitment, and the analytics being web-based is a data-governance question worth asking about before an evaluation.

The decision rule is the usual one. For a handful of tissues in a group that already has imaging capability, optical with your own microscope is cheaper and adequate. For a screening programme with many tissues and repeated timepoints, an instrument pays for itself in labour and in data consistency — and the question becomes what the consumables cost over three years, which you can only learn by asking for a quote.

Ask for that number explicitly. A plate quote and an instrument quote together are not a cost of ownership.

Being clear about instrument lock-in

This category is more instrument-coupled than any other tissue category, and it is worth saying plainly rather than implying it.

Where lock-in is real. If you buy a Mantarray, your force data comes from Mantarray plates. If you buy a DiNAQUBE, your measurements run through DiNAQUBE and its analytics. Both companies are building a measurement platform and the consumable stream is the business model. That is a legitimate model — it is how most of analytical instrumentation works — but it should be priced as a multi-year commitment, not as a plate purchase.

Where lock-in is not real. myriamed’s plates are SBS format with optical readout, so a tissue cast on a myrPlate can be imaged on whatever you have. And a finished myrTissue-Cardio is not coupled to anything: it is a living tissue, and what you do with it is your problem.

The question to ask every vendor. Not “is it open” — everyone says yes. Ask: can I read force from your tissue without your instrument, and can I run your consumable on someone else’s reader? They are two separate questions, and a vendor can answer yes to one and no to the other.

Naming, because the search results are confusing

Two name changes will trip you up when researching this category.

EHT Technologies GmbH is now DiNABIOS. The Hamburg company, founded on hiPSC and engineered heart tissue research at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, was acquired by the gene therapy platform company DiNAQOR in January 2021 and now trades as DiNABIOS. The eht-technologies.com domain still resolves and serves the DiNABIOS site. It presents itself as a clinical research organisation that also develops life science tools, offering two engagement shapes: services executed in their lab, or the DiNAQUBE installed in yours.

“EHT” is both a company name and a generic term. Engineered heart tissue as a technique originates from the same Hamburg academic lineage that produced the company. Searching for “EHT supplier” returns the company; searching for the technique returns the literature. Both are relevant and they are not the same thing.

Which route fits which situation

Buy the finished tissue when you need cardiac tissue and do not have — or do not want to build — a tissue engineering capability. The lead time is six to eight weeks, the price is €667 to €1,400 per tissue depending on quantity, and you can start experiments 24 hours after delivery. This is the right answer for a biohybrid engineering group, a pharmacology lab without stem cell capability, or anyone running a one-off study.

Buy the plate and cast it yourself when you have iPSC or cardiomyocyte culture running, you need many tissues, or you need to vary the cell source between conditions. A gradient plate at €330 first, then uniform plates. Budget the cells as the dominant cost.

Buy the instrument when contractility measurement is a recurring capability rather than a project — a screening programme, a safety pharmacology function, or a group whose deliverable is force data. Get the three-year consumable cost in writing before comparing platforms.

Buy the study when you need an answer rather than a capability. DiNABIOS and Curi Bio both run fee-for-service programmes on their own platforms, and for a single decision point that is frequently cheaper and faster than building anything.

Specification checklist for an EHT quote

• What arrives: a finished tissue, an empty plate, an instrument, or a report. Establish this before comparing numbers.
• Cell source: the supplier’s line, or yours. If yours, what the acceptance criteria are on the cells you send.
• Genotype: wild type, named cardiomyopathy or channelopathy mutation, isogenic control.
• Tissue format and geometry: ring, strip, post-anchored. Whether the geometry is fixed.
• Post or stretcher stiffness, with a value and a tolerance, not a shrug.
• Force readout technology, and whether force can be extracted without the vendor’s instrument.
• Consumable cost over three years if an instrument is involved.
• Whether electrical stimulation hardware is included, needed, or extra.
• Lead time, and whether it is manufacturing lead time or shipping lead time. For a made-to-order tissue these are very different things.
• Shipping condition — ambient, cold or cryogenic — and the recovery procedure on arrival.
• Certificate of analysis contents, and what is measured on each released batch.
• Quantity pricing, because the per-tissue cost halves between one and twelve at the one supplier that publishes a ladder.
• Licence terms for anything beyond internal research use.

Where to go next

iPSC cardiomyocytes covers the cell input including subtype, purity and MEA evidence, and the price comparison normalises those figures per million. For the skeletal equivalent — where the market behaves very differently — engineered skeletal muscle tissue and 3D skeletal muscle models compared cover devices, force readouts and cost per data point. Engineered tissue is the category map.

How we can help

The comparison that decides this purchase is cost per usable data point across three years, and no vendor will run it for you because it requires their consumable pricing next to a competitor’s.

We will get the quote-only numbers — Mantarray consumables, DiNAQUBE engagement models, custom programme pricing — and put them beside the one published price ladder in the category so you can see what the instrument route costs against simply buying tissues. If your tissue count is low enough that buying finished tissue beats building a capability, we will tell you that, and if your geometry does not exist in any catalogue we will say so rather than quote you something adjacent.

Tell us the tissue count, the readout you need, whether you already own an instrument, and the date.