What iPSC-derived neurons actually cost per million cells

The short answer: roughly $560 to $860 per million cells for standard, non-disease human iPSC-derived neurons at single-vial quantities, with disease and reporter lines carrying a premium of about 15 to 25 percent at the same cell count.

That range is wide for what is nominally the same product, and the reason is not quality. It is that no two suppliers describe the unit the same way.

The prices we recorded

The iXCells figure was confirmed directly against their live store on the date shown. The BrainXell figures were captured the same day; a re-fetch was subsequently blocked, so treat them as accurate as of capture rather than continuously verified.

This table covers excitatory cortical neurons only, because that is the one subtype several suppliers price publicly in a comparable unit. Two adjacent categories are priced separately and sit on their own pages: iPSC-derived motor neurons, which are the input for neuromuscular work, and iPSC astrocytes, microglia and glia, which most MEA protocols require alongside the neurons and which are frequently left out of a budget built from this table alone. If you are converting any of these prices into a plate count, vials to wells does the arithmetic.

Volume changes the answer more than vendor choice does

The spread that matters in that table is not between companies. It is the spread within one of them. BrainXell’s own pricing falls from $650 to $350 per million — a 46 percent reduction — purely on moving from a one-million to a five-million vial.

If you are comparing two suppliers at different vial sizes, you are not comparing suppliers. You are comparing pack sizes, and the larger pack wins almost regardless of who sells it.

What the headline price leaves out

A neuron vial is rarely the whole purchase. Depending on the product, a working experiment also needs:

• Media and supplements. Frequently required to achieve the attachment and survival performance stated on the datasheet. The FUJIFILM CDI listing above makes this explicit by pricing “cells only” and “kit” separately — a $100 difference on a $616 item.
• Coating. Poly-ornithine, laminin or an equivalent substrate.
• Shipping. Dry ice, and for international destinations, an import permit.
• Licence rights. The one that actually matters. Research use is normally granted. The right to manufacture and sell a differentiated derivative commercially usually is not, and is negotiated separately.

That last point is worth more attention than the price. For a laboratory buying two vials for an experiment, licensing is a formality. For anyone intending to build a product on top of these cells, it is the gating cost, and it does not appear on any price list.

Why the per-million figures are not strictly comparable

Three counting conventions are in circulation:

1. Total cells at freeze. The count before cryopreservation losses.
2. Viable cells post-thaw. The count that survives, which is the number you can actually plate.
3. Cells guaranteed to attach. Rarer, and the most honest of the three.

A vendor quoting convention 1 against a vendor quoting convention 2 will look cheaper while delivering less. When we normalise prices for a client, this is the first thing we ask about, and it is a question suppliers answer readily once asked directly.

What we would check before ordering

• Which counting convention the cell number uses.
• Whether the price includes matched media, or assumes you buy it.
• Post-thaw viability specification, and the method used to measure it.
• Purity specification, and against which markers.
• Whether the supplier publishes raw electrophysiology traces, if network activity matters to you.
• The licence terms attaching to derivatives, if you intend to sell anything downstream.

How we can help

We hold these figures because we maintain them, not because we resell any particular supplier. If you tell us the subtype, count, genotype and format you need, we will source current quotes against that specification and normalise them to the same counting convention so the comparison is real.