iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes: what is actually available and what it costs

The short answer: human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes list from about $405 to $613 per vial as cells only, and from roughly $713 to $1,445 as a kit with matched media, from at least five suppliers who publish a number. Ventricular and atrial subtypes are separately catalogued and identically priced at one supplier; no supplier surveyed sells a nodal-subtype cardiomyocyte as a catalogue item.

The harder question is not price. It is that “cardiomyocyte” covers a ventricular-like population with a stated 95 percent purity, an atrial population with a completely different action potential, and a mixed population sold without a numeric threshold at all — and the three cost roughly the same.

The availability table

Read that table for what is absent as much as what is present. Two of the eleven rows carry a numeric purity threshold. One supplier — Ncardia — puts a functional MEA panel into routine lot release rather than into a marketing figure, which is a materially different kind of evidence and, for an electrophysiology assay, arguably the more useful one.

And bit.bio, which sells eleven other iPSC-derived cell types with published prices, has no cardiomyocyte at all. If a supplier you expect to see is missing from a comparison, that is usually the answer.

Subtype is the specification that actually matters

More cardiomyocyte purchases go wrong on subtype than on purity, because the wrong subtype produces data that looks entirely healthy and answers a different question.

Ventricular-like. The default for contractility, cardiotoxicity, arrhythmia and force measurement. Ncardia states the ventricular identity explicitly and supports it with MLC2v expression — and publishes the honest number, 76 percent cTnT/MLC2v double positive in the representative batch, alongside the headline 99 percent cTnT. That gap between “is a cardiomyocyte” and “is a ventricular cardiomyocyte” is the number your assay depends on, and few vendors publish it.

Atrial. A different action potential morphology, different repolarisation, different pharmacology. Axol catalogues atrial cardiomyocytes as separate SKUs at the same price as ventricular from the same donor, with MLC2a and ANP as the identifying markers and published compound response data on atrial action potential parameters.

Nodal / pacemaker. We found no supplier selling a nodal-subtype iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte as a catalogue product with a price. Spontaneous beating in a mixed cardiomyocyte preparation is frequently driven by a nodal-like subpopulation, which is why “it beats” is not evidence of subtype identity. If your assay requires pacemaker cells specifically, this is a custom differentiation enquiry, not a catalogue purchase.

Mixed / not subtype-resolved. FUJIFILM CDI’s iCell products are the most widely published cardiomyocytes in the field and are not sold on a ventricular-versus-atrial axis. For CiPA-style proarrhythmia work, where the published protocol base and cross-laboratory comparability matter more than subtype purity, that is a feature rather than a gap.

The practical rule: if your readout is action potential duration, repolarisation or field potential duration, subtype is a gating specification. If your readout is viability, metabolic activity or gross contractility, it may not be.

Beat rate: nobody guarantees one

We looked specifically for a published beat-rate specification and did not find one at any supplier. What exists instead:

• FUJIFILM CDI states that iCell Cardiomyocytes exhibit synchronous beating when seeded at appropriate densities, and that iCell Cardiomyocytes² are assay-ready as early as four days post-thaw. Both are conditional statements, correctly so.
• Ncardia characterises Ncyte vCardiomyocytes at day 3 of culture following its user guide, and markets the ventricular subtype’s relatively slow beat rate as an advantage because it leaves room for electrical pacing.
• BPS Bioscience publishes viability and plating efficiency at thaw rather than a beat rate.

That is the honest state of the market: beating frequency depends on seeding density, medium, substrate, temperature and how long since thaw, so no supplier will commit to a number, and any that did would be making a promise they could not test on your bench. The right question to a supplier is not “what is the beat rate” but “by which day post-thaw does the vendor’s own protocol expect synchronous spontaneous beating, at what seeding density, in which medium”.

Ncardia’s point about pacing is worth taking seriously. If your assay paces the tissue anyway, a slow or irregular intrinsic rate is not a defect — it is headroom.

MEA and calcium imaging: which products actually have the data

This is where the suppliers separate meaningfully.

Ncardia is the only supplier in the set that publishes MEA functionality as part of the routine lot QC panel, with three named reference compounds: dofetilide (IKr block), nifedipine (ICa-L block) and isoproterenol (β-adrenergic stimulation). That means every lot you receive has been shown to respond to a defined pharmacological panel on an electrode array before it ships. For an electrophysiology laboratory, this is the single strongest evidence position in the category.

FUJIFILM CDI publishes optimised proarrhythmia testing protocols covering both MEA and impedance, shows E-4031-induced field potential duration prolongation and nifedipine-induced shortening, and lists calcium flux on the Hamamatsu FDSS/µCELL as a supported application. It is also a featured cell model in the CiPA initiative, which is why so much cross-laboratory comparison data exists for it. The evidence is published rather than lot-specific, which is a different but not inferior guarantee.

Axol references patch clamp and RNA-seq in its product documentation and publishes atrial compound response data for lidocaine, nifedipine and E-4031 on action potential parameters.

BPS Bioscience publishes doxorubicin cardiotoxicity response data and cTnT flow cytometry, which is a cytotoxicity evidence base rather than an electrophysiology one.

If the cells are going onto an electrode array, ask for the lot-specific MEA trace, not the catalogue figure. One supplier here can supply it as a matter of course.

The two levers that move cost more than vendor choice

Pack size

BPS prices the same catalogue item at $405 for one million cells and $1,150 for five million — $405 against $230 per million, a 43 percent reduction achieved by buying a larger vial. FUJIFILM CDI offers 1.25 million and 5 million configurations of the same SKU family.

No comparison between vendors on this page approaches that spread. Decide the total cell count for the whole programme before you compare suppliers. Eleven single-million BPS vials over a year is $4,455; two five-million vials plus one single is $2,705 for the same count.

The kit premium

Axol’s cells-and-kit SKU pairs isolate the bundle exactly, and the premium is a flat $865 in every case:

A flat premium rather than a percentage tells you it is a fixed bundle of media, supplement and coating. Axol’s standalone cardiomyocyte maintenance medium, 500 mL, lists at $492, so the medium accounts for the majority of the bundle.

FUJIFILM CDI’s equivalent step is much smaller — from $613 cells-only to from $713 as a kit, a $100 difference. The two vendors bundle different quantities of medium, so kit prices are not comparable across companies. Compare cells to cells.

The decision rule is straightforward. If you already run a validated cardiomyocyte maintenance medium, buy cells only. If this is a first cardiomyocyte experiment, buy the kit once: datasheet performance is stated against the matched medium, and diagnosing attachment failure in an unmatched medium burns more than $865 of technician time.

Licensing, which is the field that does not appear on the price list

Every product above is research use only as sold. The variation is in how explicitly each supplier constrains what comes next, and cardiomyocytes carry an unusually visible layer of it.

BPS Bioscience publishes the most explicit statement we found in the category: the underlying iPSC technology is protected by a named list of US patents licensed from iPS Academia Japan with sub-licensable rights, and commercial use of the cells is not allowed and requires an appropriate licence from iPS Academia Japan. That is printed on the product page, not buried in terms.

FUJIFILM CDI maintains a product restrictions policy limiting the use of certain SKUs to provide services to third parties, and states that its published prices are valid in the US and Europe only, with separate pricing for other regions.

Axol publishes lineage-specific restrictions on some donor lines — the ax2508 and ax2518 ventricular and atrial products descend from a donor lineage carrying a documented sequencing restriction.

For a laboratory running its own experiments, none of this matters. For anyone building a screening service, a product, or anything sold for consideration, the licence is the gating cost and it is negotiated separately from the purchase. Raise it in the first email, not after the first successful experiment.

Where cardiomyocytes go next: 3D and biohybrid use

Cardiomyocytes are the cheapest and fastest route to a genuinely contractile human tissue, which makes them the default entry point for biohybrid actuator work that does not specifically require skeletal muscle. Two routes exist:

Cast them yourself into an engineered heart tissue. Curi Bio sells the Mantarray 24-well casting system and myriamed sells 48-well myrPlates with paired flexible stretchers at €270 per plate. Both are moulds — you supply cells, matrix and several weeks of culture. Curi Bio also sells cardiac tri-culture reagents, and FUJIFILM CDI publishes a cardiac tri-culture microtissue application combining iCell Cardiomyocytes² with iCell Endothelial Cells and primary cardiac fibroblasts, which the vendor reports gives enhanced calcium transient amplitude relative to cardiomyocyte-only microtissues.

Buy the tissue already built. myriamed sells myrTissue-Cardio, a finished engineered heart muscle from iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes and fibroblasts, at €1,400 for a single tissue on a six-to-eight-week order-related manufacturing lead time. That is the only finished contractile human cardiac tissue we found with a public per-unit price. The full account is in engineered heart tissue.

The arithmetic that matters if you are considering the 3D route: a cardiomyocyte vial is a few hundred dollars, and a finished tissue is over a thousand euros each. The gap is culture labour, maturation time and casting skill, not cells.

Specification checklist for a cardiomyocyte quote

Send this and the responses become comparable:

• Subtype: ventricular, atrial, nodal, or mixed — and stated against which markers.
• Purity specification, the assay, and whether it is a release criterion or a typical value.
• Whether a lot-specific certificate of analysis is available before you commit, and what fraction of lots fall below the internal threshold.
• Cell count and the counting convention — total at freeze, viable post-thaw, or viable at a named day of culture. Ncardia states day 3 explicitly; not everyone does.
• Pack size options at the total count for the whole programme, not the next experiment.
• Kit versus cells only, and which medium the datasheet performance was measured in.
• Days post-thaw to synchronous beating at a named seeding density, in the vendor’s own protocol.
• MEA or calcium data: published application data, or a lot-specific trace.
• Donor age, sex and disease genotype, and whether a matched isogenic control is needed. Reserve both at once or neither.
• Shipping format — dry ice or dry shipper. Ncardia ships in a dry shipper at −180 °C to −135 °C, which is a different receiving procedure from dry ice.
• Licence terms for anything beyond internal research use.

Where to go next

The price comparison does the per-million arithmetic with the counting conventions stated. If the destination is a 3D construct rather than a monolayer, engineered heart tissue covers what is buildable, what is buyable and what each route locks you into. The QC checklist is the generic version of the questions above.

How we can help

We hold these figures because we re-verify them, not because we resell any supplier. Tell us the subtype, the count, the donor constraints and the readout format, and we will source current quotes, normalise them to the same counting convention, and chase the two things vendors do not volunteer: the lot-specific certificate of analysis and the licence terms attaching to derivatives.

Where a catalogue item is simply the right answer — and at research volumes for cardiomyocytes it frequently is — we will say so.