What iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes actually cost

The short answer: $230 to $580 per million cells for standard, non-diseased human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes bought as cells only, and $1,359 to $1,445 for the same cells bought as a kit with matched media, supplement and coating included.

The cells-only band and the kit band are the same product. The difference is roughly $800, and whether you need to pay it depends entirely on what you already have in the fridge.

The prices we recorded

And the same cells sold as a complete kit:

The finding that matters most

Look at the two BPS rows. Same catalogue number, same product, same donor material: $405 for one million cells and $1,150 for five million. That is $405 per million against $230 per million, a 43 percent reduction, achieved purely by buying a bigger vial.

No comparison between suppliers on this page comes close to that. If you are choosing between Axol at $494 for one million and BPS at $230 for five million, you are not comparing suppliers. You are comparing pack sizes, and the larger pack wins.

The practical consequence: before you run a vendor comparison, decide how many cells you actually need across the whole programme. A lab that buys eleven single-million vials over a year at $405 each spends $4,455 for eleven million cells. The same lab buying two five-million vials and one single spends $2,705 for the same count. The saving is larger than any negotiating leverage a first-time buyer has.

The kit premium, priced out

Axol prices cells and kits separately across four SKUs, which lets us isolate the bundle exactly:

The premium is a flat $865 in every case, which tells you it is a fixed bundle of media, supplement and coating rather than a percentage uplift. Axol’s standalone maintenance media, 500 mL, is $492 — so on the arithmetic, the media accounts for a majority of the bundle and supplement plus coating make up the rest.

FUJIFILM CDI’s equivalent step is smaller: from $613 cells-only to from $713 as a kit, a $100 difference. The two suppliers are bundling different amounts of medium, and the kit-versus-cells comparison across companies is therefore not meaningful. Compare cells to cells.

Rule of thumb from these numbers: if your lab already runs a validated cardiomyocyte maintenance medium, buy cells only. If this is your first cardiomyocyte experiment, buy the kit once — the datasheet performance is stated against the matched medium, and troubleshooting attachment failures with an unmatched medium costs more than $865 in wasted time.

Purity: what each supplier publishes

Purity is the specification buyers ask about most and the one that is hardest to compare, because suppliers state it differently and measure it differently.

Only one of the three publishes a number. The other two publish evidence — flow cytometry plots, immunocytochemistry images, electrophysiology traces — which is arguably more useful than a threshold but is not something you can put in a comparison column.

This is the honest position: you cannot rank these three products by purity from public information. If purity is a release criterion for your assay, ask each supplier for the lot-specific certificate of analysis before ordering, and ask what percentage of lots fall below their internal threshold. Both are questions suppliers answer when asked directly.

Subtype matters more than most buyers realise

Axol is the only supplier in this set that prices ventricular and atrial cardiomyocytes as distinct SKUs at the same price point ($494 each for the male 74 donor, $580 each for the female 45 donor). That distinction is not cosmetic:

• Ventricular cardiomyocytes are the default for contractility, cardiotoxicity and most arrhythmia work.
• Atrial cardiomyocytes have a different action potential morphology and different pharmacology. Axol’s product documentation shows atrial-specific markers MLC2a and ANP, and compound response data for lidocaine, nifedipine and E-4031 on atrial action potential parameters.

If your assay reads action potential duration or repolarisation, ordering the wrong subtype produces data that looks fine and means something different. Confirm subtype before you confirm price.

Donor variables that show up in the price

The Axol data gives a clean two-donor comparison at identical specification:

An $86 spread on the cells, 17 percent, between two healthy donors. No public information explains it, and we are not going to guess. If donor sex or age is a variable in your study design, the relevant point is simply that donor-matched material is available and priced, and that the premium is small enough not to drive the decision.

What the headline price still leaves out

• Shipping. Cryopreserved vials ship on dry ice. For international destinations, add an import permit and customs clearance time.
• Plate coating. Included in the Axol kits, priced separately or assumed elsewhere.
• Instrument time. If the readout is impedance, MEA or calcium imaging, the consumable plate is often a larger per-experiment cost than the cells.
• Licence rights. BPS states explicitly on its product page that the underlying iPSC technology is covered by named patents licensed from iPS Academia Japan, and that commercial use requires an appropriate licence. FUJIFILM CDI publishes product restrictions that limit use of some SKUs for providing services to third parties. Neither restriction affects a lab running its own experiments. Both matter enormously if you intend to sell a service or a product built on these cells.

That last point is the one to check before you compare prices, not after. A $200 per-million saving is irrelevant if the licence terms prevent the use you have in mind.

What we would check before ordering

• Whether the stated cell count is a minimum (“≥1 million”) or an exact figure, and whether it is counted at freeze or post-thaw.
• The lot-specific certificate of analysis, and specifically the purity figure for that lot rather than the catalogue specification.
• Subtype: ventricular, atrial or nodal, and against which markers.
• Whether spontaneous beating is specified, and by what day post-thaw.
• Whether the price includes matched medium, and if not, what medium the datasheet performance was measured in.
• Pack-size pricing at the count you actually need across the whole programme, not the count for the next experiment.
• Licence terms for anything beyond internal research use.

How we can help

We hold these figures because we re-verify them, not because we resell any particular supplier. Tell us the subtype, the cell count, the donor constraints and the assay format, and we will source current quotes against that specification, normalise them to the same counting convention, and show you where the quoted numbers sit against the published list prices above.

Where the catalogue item is simply the right answer — and for cardiomyocytes at research volumes it frequently is — we will tell you that.

Send us a specification.