What engineered living components cost

The short answer: a vial of human iPSC-derived cells is $400 to $1,600, a living 3D epidermis kit is quote only from the two established suppliers, a single QC assay is $30 to $920 depending on which assay and who runs it, and a custom microfluidic culture device is $285 to $1,500 of tooling plus $60 to $110 per part.

Those numbers are unusually hard to find because most of this market prices by quote. The table below is the index of what we could actually verify, with the source and the date for every band.

The index

How to read this table

“Quote only” means we checked. It is not a placeholder. For reconstructed human epidermis, MatTek’s product page carries a “Request a Quote” button and no figure; EPISKIN publishes specifications for SkinEthic RHE and no price. Both are established, high-volume producers. The absence is a deliberate commercial choice, not an oversight, and it is the single most common structural feature of this market.

Band width is mostly not quality. Where a category shows a three-fold spread, the usual cause is that the unit differs. A vial of neurons at $643 and a vial at $1,537 are, in the two cases we traced, a normal line and a homozygous disease-mutant line from the same supplier at the same cell count. Genotype is the price driver, not vendor positioning.

Academic core rates and commercial rates are not interchangeable. Several of the QC bands above are wide because they mix university core facilities with commercial service providers. An STR profile is $65 at the Arizona Genetics Core on the academic rate and $217 as an ATCC kit-and-report service. Those buy different things: the core sells you an allele table, ATCC sells you an allele table plus interpretation against its own reference database. If you are publishing, the difference matters. If you are just checking a bank, it may not.

Where the money actually goes

Three cost centres dominate almost every wetware purchase, and only one of them appears on a price list.

1. The unit itself. Vials, kits, tissues, plasticware. This is the visible number and usually the smallest of the three for anything beyond a one-off experiment.

2. Everything the unit needs to work. Matched media, supplements, coating substrate, dry ice, import permits. Vendors that price “cells only” and “kit” separately make this legible; most do not. The gap between the two on one product line we checked was $100 on a $613 item, so roughly 16 percent. On other lines the matched-media bundle is more than double the cells-only price.

3. Licence rights. Research use is granted routinely. The right to build a commercial product on a differentiated derivative usually is not, and is negotiated separately. This never appears on a price list and it is frequently the largest number in the deal.

What changes the price most

Ranked by the size of the effect we observed:

1. Pack size. Within a single supplier’s own catalogue, cardiomyocytes fell from $405 to $230 per million on moving from a 1 million to a 5 million cell vial — a 43 percent reduction with no change of vendor, product or specification.
2. Genotype. Disease-mutant and homozygous variants carry a premium over the isogenic control of the same product, sometimes more than double.
3. Bundling. Whether media, supplement and coating are included.
4. Who runs the assay. For QC, the academic-core versus commercial-lab split is worth two to four times.
5. Volume tier, for devices. Non-recurring tooling dominates at n = 1 and becomes irrelevant by n = 1,000. See the microfluidics page for the arithmetic.

The spokes

Each of these pages carries the underlying table with per-figure sources and observation dates.

• iPSC-derived neuron prices per million cells — the normalised per-million comparison across four named suppliers, and why the cell-counting conventions make the comparison harder than it looks.
• iPSC cardiomyocyte prices compared — three suppliers with live published prices, normalised per million viable cells, with the purity specification each one publishes.
• Buy or differentiate? A cost model for iPSC neurons — the full total-cost-of-ownership model: reagents, media, line licence, technician hours, failure rate and incubator time against catalogue price, with a breakeven by batches per year. Every assumption is stated and every catalogue input is sourced.
• Cell banking service costs — what a master bank, a working bank and a research-use bank actually consist of, what the published per-vial and per-service rates are, and where the quote-only wall sits.
• What cell QC testing costs — STR, mycoplasma, sterility, karyotype and endotoxin, by assay, by method, by provider, with turnaround and the point in a programme at which each becomes required rather than optional.
• Reconstructed human epidermis: price and spec comparison — the verified MatTek EpiDerm specification, the regulatory validations that attach to it, the two suppliers that do publish a number, and an honest account of what the quote-only models leave you unable to compare.
• What custom microfluidic device fabrication costs — NRE versus per-part by fabrication method across volume tiers of 1, 10, 100 and 1,000, built on published fabricator pricing rather than industry rules of thumb.

Verification policy

Every figure on these pages carries the source and the date it was observed. Prices move. A figure captured on 2026-09-01 is accurate as of 2026-09-01 and nothing more, and we say so rather than presenting a stale number as current.

Where a figure came from a live store API or a live product page, we say “live”. Where a page subsequently blocked automated re-fetch, we say so and treat the figure as accurate at capture rather than continuously verified. Where a supplier publishes a “from” price on a configurable product, we carry the “from” wording rather than silently converting it into a flat price.

We never present a range as a quote. A band on this site tells you what to expect on the first call. It does not tell you what you will pay.

How we can help

We maintain this index because we run sourcing against it, not because we resell any particular supplier. If you have a specification, we will put it to the suppliers that can actually meet it, normalise the responses to a common unit, and tell you where the quoted prices sit relative to the published ones above — including when the honest answer is that the catalogue item is cheaper than anything we could broker.

Send us a specification and we will come back with sourced, comparable numbers.