Buying liver microtissues and spheroids: what ships, what it costs, and when

The short answer: a plate of 96 assay-ready human liver microtissues with 250 mL of matched medium lists at $4,280 from InSphero — roughly $45 per microtissue — and that is the only public price in the category. Everything else is quote-only.

The second thing to know: the constraint on this purchase is a date, not a price. Liver microtissues are grown on a weekly production calendar, shipped against published order-by dates, and they do not exist until they are made. Ordering three weeks before you need them is not caution, it is the normal procedure.

What is actually available

Read the table structurally, not row by row

There are three genuinely different things in that table and they are routinely confused.

Scaffold-free spheroids that arrive already made. InSphero and MatTek HUREL. You buy a plate with living tissue in it, and you start at dosing. The commercial deal is that the supplier absorbs the aggregation risk.

A perfused scaffold plate you seed yourself. CN Bio’s PhysioMimix liver plates are consumables for an instrument. The plate arrives empty; you supply 400,000 to 600,000 primary human hepatocytes per well for Liver-12, or 150,000 for Liver-48, and the perfusion system does the rest. This is a capability purchase, not a tissue purchase, and the cell cost per plate is substantial and separate.

Hepatocytes as cells. bit.bio’s ioHepatocytes are a cryopreserved vial product. Cheap per million by the standards of iPSC-derived cells, and completely different from a microtissue: you build whatever you build.

If you have been given three quotes that all say “liver model”, check which of these three you are being quoted before comparing the numbers.

The InSphero price, unpacked

At $4,280 for one Akura 96 plate plus 250 mL of medium, with one microtissue per well, the arithmetic is roughly $45 per microtissue. Two caveats on that figure.

First, the medium is bundled and not optional. InSphero states explicitly that the product is offered only as a bundle including the liver microtissues and the appropriate medium type at 250 mL. So $4,280 is not a tissue price with a medium premium on top — it is the complete unit, and there is no cheaper cells-only configuration to find.

Second, the medium configuration is a specification choice, not a packaging one. The three variants — TOX, AF and INF — are separately catalogued at the same price, optimised for different application classes, from safety assessment through to efficacy testing. Ordering the wrong one is not a cost error; it is an experiment error. InSphero publishes a medium selection guide, and this is the field to get right in the first email.

Shipping is excluded and calculated separately against plate quantity and destination, with the supplier’s service team confirming order details and ship dates before the order is confirmed. Budget for it as a real line, particularly outside the US and Europe.

The species panel pricing matters for cross-species metabolism work: dog at $9,140 and mouse at $9,680 are two-plate bundles, so per-plate they are roughly $4,570 and $4,840 — a modest premium over human, and considerably less than the cost of building species-specific liver models in-house.

Longevity is the specification that changes the assay you can run

This is the single most useful axis on which these products differ, and it is stated clearly by two suppliers.

InSphero: up to 4 weeks. The stated position is high viability and consistent albumin secretion maintained for up to four weeks, with stable cytochrome P450 activity over an extended period. Four weeks of viability is what makes repeated-dose studies, long-term liver safety work and chronic exposure designs possible in a spheroid format at all. It also creates scheduling flexibility on arrival — the plate does not force you to start on the day it lands.

CN Bio: at least 4 weeks under perfusion. The mechanism is different — continuous perfusion providing oxygen and nutrients maintains cell phenotype and function — but the stated window is comparable. The trade is that you supply and seed the cells.

MatTek HUREL: framed as phenotypic stability rather than a day count. MatTek describes the HUREL micro livers as producing the longest-enduring, most phenotypically stable and metabolically competent liver tissue construct developed to date, in peer-reviewed studies, and attributes the metabolic competency in part to a multi-fold greater hepatocyte number and therefore greater cell density within the microtitre well. The practical guidance published with the product is more useful than the claim: serum-free dosing medium is recommended for assays up to 7 days, and for long-term assays beyond 7 days the serum-containing maintenance medium is recommended for cell stability.

That distinction — dosing medium for short assays, maintenance medium for long ones — is a real protocol constraint, and it means the two media supplied with a HUREL plate are not interchangeable.

What to take from this: if your assay is a 24-to-72-hour cytotoxicity or clearance measurement, longevity is not a differentiator and you should buy on price, availability and donor composition. If your assay runs past a week — repeated dosing, chronic steatosis, slow-onset toxicity, oligonucleotide work — longevity is the gating specification and it narrows the field immediately.

Donor pooling: what it buys and what it costs you

InSphero’s human product is the clearest published pooling statement in the category: primary human hepatocytes pooled from ten donors, five male and five female, combined with non-parenchymal cells from a single donor.

What pooling buys. Broad human population response in a single assay. Interindividual variation in hepatic metabolism is large, and a ten-donor pool means a clearance or toxicity result reflects an average rather than one person’s enzyme complement. For safety assessment intended to generalise, that is the right design.

What pooling costs you. You cannot see the variation. If your question is specifically about polymorphic metabolism, a susceptible subpopulation, or donor-to-donor variability in a toxicity signal, a pooled model averages away the phenomenon you are studying. For that work you want single-donor material, and MatTek catalogues HUREL Human alongside HUREL Human Pool precisely because both questions exist.

The asymmetry to notice. In the InSphero human product the hepatocytes are pooled from ten donors but the non-parenchymal cells come from a single donor. If your endpoint is immune-mediated — Kupffer cell activation, cytokine release, immune-mediated liver injury — the immunological half of the model is single-donor, whatever the pooling on the hepatocyte side. That is not a criticism of the product; it is a fact about it that determines whether it answers your question.

The species-specific products invert the pooling in an instructive way: the beagle dog model uses single-donor hepatocytes with single-donor non-parenchymal cells, while the C57BL/6 mouse model uses pooled donors on both sides. That reflects the underlying biology — an inbred mouse strain is genetically uniform in a way a dog colony is not — and it is a good reminder to check the pooling per product rather than per supplier.

The production calendar, which is the actual constraint

InSphero publishes a production schedule with order-by dates and expected delivery windows, and states that unless otherwise indicated, requests received by the listed order-by date ship from the facility on the following Tuesday to US customers or Wednesday to European customers, by express delivery. Microtissues are produced weekly. Delivery worldwide is stated as within 14 days of order.

The published operational detail is unusually specific and worth acting on:

• Ordering commits you to accepting delivery within the stated expected-delivery-date range. This is not a shipment you can defer once placed.
• Availability on a desired shipment date must be verified with the supplier’s representative, and the supplier may adjust the shipment date depending on capacity in a given week.
• Some destinations are excluded from certain weeks. The published schedule carries footnotes for shipments outside the standard pattern, and species-specific microtissues to certain countries require separate deadline confirmation.
• Ordering is possible through the supplier’s own shop and through Science Exchange and Scientist.com, which matters if your institution routes procurement through a marketplace.

InSphero ships in a temperature- and humidity-controlled system and publishes a specific guarantee: all plates shipped had microtissues in every well destined to be filled, confirmed by optical scans of each plate, and the supplier guarantees at least 95 percent of microtissues will be available for use on arrival. A small number may be damaged in transit.

That 95 percent figure is a genuine, checkable commitment and it is rare in this market. It also tells you what to do on arrival.

QC on arrival

For any pre-formed liver microtissue delivery:

1. Read the temperature record. MatTek ships HUREL plates with a disposable USB temperature recorder that writes a PDF output file directly to the USB drive with no software required, and asks for the file to be emailed back. Do that on the day, not at the end of the study.
2. Count the wells. With a 95 percent availability guarantee, counting is the acceptance test. An optical scan was taken at packing; if your count falls materially short, you have a claim with evidence on both sides.
3. Inspect for damaged or fragmented spheroids before the first medium change.
4. Change to the correct medium immediately. For HUREL, the serum-containing maintenance medium is recommended for the media change on plate arrival. Using the dosing medium at this step is a protocol error, not a preference.
5. Keep the certificate of analysis lot information — supplied in the package — against the experiment record.
6. Check the spare lids and heat packs are present. They are supplied for a reason and a missing lid at the bench is an avoidable contamination risk.

What a liver microtissue purchase does not include

• Shipping, calculated per plate count and destination, and confirmed before the order is accepted.
• Additional medium beyond the bundled volume, for any study running past the supplied 250 mL. InSphero supplies 250 mL per plate bundle; MatTek supplies 65 mL each of maintenance and dosing medium per HUREL plate with a media change recommended every two days.
• Assay reagents and readouts. Albumin ELISA, CYP substrates, ATP or LDH kits, imaging.
• The instrument, for the perfused route. A CN Bio liver plate does nothing without a PhysioMimix Core system, and the Liver-48 route further requires the higher-throughput single-organ configuration.
• The hepatocytes, for the perfused route. At 400,000 to 600,000 primary human hepatocytes per well across twelve wells, a single Liver-12 plate consumes roughly 5 to 7 million PHH. That is a larger line item than most plate quotes.

That last point is the honest comparison between the scaffold-free and perfused routes. A ready-to-use spheroid plate at $4,280 includes the cells. A perfused plate quote does not, and the cells for one plate are a substantial multiple of a hepatocyte vial price.

A note on plate material, because it changes your data

CN Bio publishes something most vendors leave unstated: its multi-chip consumable plates are made of cyclic olefin copolymer (COC), an amorphous thermoplastic, chosen because it is less adsorbent than commonly used polydimethylsiloxane, so experiments are less prone to drug loss from non-specific binding.

Small-molecule absorption into PDMS is a well-documented problem in microfluidic culture and it silently changes effective dose. If you are comparing a perfused platform against a static plate, or comparing two perfused platforms, ask what the wetted material is. It is a legitimate technical differentiator and a supplier that publishes it is telling you something useful.

Specification checklist for a liver microtissue quote

• Model class: pre-formed scaffold-free spheroid, perfused scaffold you seed, or hepatocytes as cells. Establish this first.
• Species, and for animal models, strain.
• Donor pooling on the hepatocyte side and on the non-parenchymal side, separately.
• Which non-parenchymal cells are included — Kupffer, endothelial, stellate — and whether the composition is guaranteed or indicative.
• Longevity, stated as days with a named functional readout, not as an adjective.
• Medium configuration, and whether it is bundled or separate. For InSphero, TOX versus AF versus INF is a specification field.
• Medium volume supplied, against your feeding schedule and study duration.
• Plate format — 96-well, 384-well, 12-well perfused, 48-well perfused.
• Microtissues per well, and the availability guarantee on arrival.
• Production schedule and order-by date for your target start date, confirmed with a named representative rather than assumed from the published table.
• Shipping cost and route to your specific address, and whether your destination has restricted weeks.
• Whether ordering through a procurement marketplace is supported, if your institution requires it.
• For the perfused route: the instrument, the plate, and the cell requirement per well, priced as three lines.

Where to go next

3D tissue model suppliers compared puts liver microtissues alongside skin, gut, airway and organ-chip products with formats and price bands. The engineered tissue map explains why liver spheroids ship as a finished good when contractile tissue does not. The QC checklist covers the acceptance questions in general form.

How we can help

The failure mode in this category is a calendar collision: a study start date that does not line up with a production week, or a plate that arrives before the assay reagents do. We check the published production schedule against your target start date before anything is committed, confirm the medium configuration matches the assay class, get shipping quoted to your actual address rather than assumed, and put the perfused and scaffold-free routes side by side on a cost-per-well basis including the cell input, which is the comparison that decides the question and the one no vendor will run for you.

Tell us the species, the study duration, the readout and the target start date.