Brokerage explainer
We are an intermediary. Here is exactly what that means.
We do not own a laboratory, we do not make anything, and we are not neutral about saying so. This page states who the counterparty is, how we are paid, what happens to your specification, and the cases where using us is the wrong decision.
The relationship, stated plainly
Four sentences that a buyer, a supplier and a lawyer should all be able to read the same way.
What we are
A sourcing intermediary. We take a written specification, circulate it to laboratories capable of the work, normalise the responses, and place an order.
Who makes the goods
A third-party laboratory, in every case, without exception. Each catalogue entry names the candidate suppliers or states that supplier selection is the job of the RFQ.
Who you contract with
Us, when we place the order and carry the margin. The supplier, when the engagement is structured as a flat brokerage fee. The quotation says which, before you accept it.
What we do not do
We hold no inventory, run no culture, operate no cleanroom and issue no certificate of analysis. Nothing on this site carries the label Made by Wetware World because it is not yet true.
The sequence, end to end
Eleven steps. Each names the party who acts and what physically changes hands.
- 01
You
You send a specification
A form, an email, a protocol PDF, a paragraph from a grant. The four fields that decide whether anything can be quoted are the component, the format and geometry, the functional acceptance criterion, and the quality evidence that must travel with the shipment. Anything you leave open a supplier will assume, and assumptions are priced defensively.
Output
A written request, held by us with a reference number.
- 02
Wetware World
We acknowledge it, in writing, from a person
Within one business day. The acknowledgement restates what we understood you to be asking for, in our words rather than yours, so that a misreading surfaces on day one instead of at quotation. If we misread it, you correct us before anything is circulated.
Output
A restated specification you can approve or amend.
- 03
Wetware World
We tell you whether it exists
Before any supplier is contacted we say whether this is a catalogue purchase, an integration of parts that are individually available, or something nobody currently sells. All three answers are common. For engineered contractile muscle, for example, the answer today is the third: no surveyed supplier lists a force-specified, mechanically anchored muscle construct as a catalogue item, so it can only be built as a programme.
Output
A feasibility statement, and the route we propose.
- 04
Wetware World
We normalise your specification into a request suppliers can price
Different laboratories quote in different units. One prices per vial, one per million cells, one per tissue, one per week of labour. We restate your requirement in each supplier’s own terms, add the acceptance criterion and the QC scope explicitly, and give every supplier the same scope so the returned numbers can be compared rather than merely collected.
Output
One request for quotation per supplier, all describing the same job.
- 05
Wetware World
We circulate it — anonymised unless you say otherwise
Suppliers receive the technical content. They do not receive your name, your institution, your funder, or your application, unless you have told us in writing that they may. We name the suppliers we approached in the quote pack, so you can see the field we ran and judge whether it was the right one.
Output
A named list of approached suppliers, and who declined.
- 06
Supplier
Suppliers quote, and some do not
A supplier may quote, decline, or propose a different scope. Declines and non-responses are reported to you as part of the result. A short list with three quotes and four silences is a more honest picture of the market than a clean table of three.
Output
Raw quotes, in whatever form each supplier issues them.
- 07
Wetware World
We normalise what comes back
Every quote is restated onto one basis: the same unit, the same quantity, the same delivery format, the same QC scope, the same incoterm-equivalent treatment of freight and cold chain, and a lead time counted from the same start event. Where a supplier has excluded something another included — the mould tooling, the force testing, the dry shipper — the exclusion is added as a visible line rather than folded silently into a total.
Output
A comparison table plus the original supplier documents, unedited.
- 08
You
You choose, or you walk away
There is no obligation and no fee for receiving quotes. If the spread tells you the thing is unaffordable, that is a real result and you keep it. If you take a quote back to a supplier and contract with them directly, we would rather you told us than pretended otherwise.
Output
Your decision, made against numbers that compare.
- 09
Wetware World and supplier
We place the order and hold the schedule
We issue the purchase order, agree the acceptance criteria in writing with the supplier before work starts, and chase the schedule. Living material has hard scheduling constraints that a purchase order cannot override — reconstructed tissue ships against a fixed weekly production cadence, and cryogenic shipments are booked against courier windows, not against your calendar.
Output
A confirmed order with a written acceptance criterion.
- 10
Supplier
The supplier makes it and the documents follow the goods
Manufacture, culture, testing and packing are the supplier’s work throughout. What arrives with the shipment is fixed at order time: certificate of analysis, mycoplasma, identity, sterility, viability, a functional trace where one was specified. If a document was not on the order, it will not be in the box.
Output
Physical goods, plus the quality file agreed at order.
- 11
Wetware World
Acceptance, or a failed batch handled openly
If the delivered material misses the written acceptance criterion, we say so, we tell you what the supplier has offered, and we tell you what we think of that offer. We do not have a stake in pretending a batch passed. A supplier that fails twice on the same criterion stops receiving our requests, and we record why.
Output
An accepted batch, a remedy, or a recorded failure.
Who does what
The column that matters most is the third one. A brokerage that pretends you have no work to do is selling you a delay.
| Task | What Wetware World does | What the supplier does | What you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writing the specification and the acceptance criterion | Restate it, question it, put it in supplier terms | Nothing — they receive it | Own it. Only you know what makes a batch useless |
| Deciding whether it is buildable at all | Answer this before circulating, using the published survey | Confirm or refuse against their own capability | Decide whether the proposed route is acceptable |
| Selecting which laboratories are asked | Select and name them; publish the basis for inclusion | Choose whether to quote | Veto any supplier, for any reason, without explaining |
| Producing the cells, tissue, device or test | None. We hold no laboratory and no production | All of it. Every physical step is theirs | Nothing, unless you are supplying your own cells |
| Setting the price | Add a disclosed margin or a flat fee — never a hidden one | Set the underlying price independently | Accept or reject it |
| Quality testing and certification | Specify which documents must travel; commission third-party QC where you want it independent | Run the tests and issue the certificates | Define what counts as a pass |
| Cold chain, permits and customs paperwork | Book it, and tell you where a permit will gate the date | Pack to the validated shipping configuration | Hold the import permits your institution requires |
| Receiving inspection | Chase the remedy and tell you plainly if it is a poor one | Remedy a batch that misses the written criterion | Inspect on arrival and tell us fast. Living material does not wait |
Liability follows this table. Where we hold the contract, we carry the commercial obligation to you and pursue the supplier behind it. Where the supplier contracts with you directly, our obligation is the sourcing work, not the batch.
How we are paid
Two structures. Both are printed on the quotation. Neither is a secret.
Structure A · Margin
We buy, we mark up, we sell
We place the purchase order with the supplier and invoice you. Our margin appears as its own line on the quotation with the supplier price beside it. You see what the laboratory charged and what we added. In exchange, we carry the commercial relationship, the schedule and the remedy when a batch fails.
Structure B · Brokerage fee
You contract, we are paid for the sourcing
Where you would rather hold the supplier relationship directly — common for repeat consumables and for institutions with their own procurement rules — the supplier invoices you and we invoice a flat fee for the sourcing and normalisation work. The fee is agreed before we circulate anything.
| Rule | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| The margin is visible | You are never shown a single blended number with our share hidden inside it. If the supplier price is commercially confidential and cannot be shown, we tell you that instead of disguising it. |
| No payment for placement | We are not paid by suppliers to appear in the catalogue, to rank higher, or to be recommended. Our survey is not a directory that sells slots. A supplier appears because the work fits them. |
| No fee for a quote | Circulating your specification and returning comparable quotes costs nothing, including when you decide not to buy. |
| Published prices stay published | Where a supplier lists a public price, we show it on the catalogue entry with its source and capture date, so you can check whether our involvement is worth anything on that line. Sometimes it is not. |
| Price basis is stated | Every quote states what is included, what is excluded — freight, cold chain, duties, permits, material transfer agreement fees, taxes — and how long the number is valid. |
What happens to your specification
The question every buyer asks second, after price.
| Default circulation | Anonymised. Suppliers receive the technical requirement without your name, your institution, your funder or your stated application. |
|---|---|
| Named circulation | Only when you tick the box or tell us in writing. Some suppliers quote faster and better when they know who is asking, and we will say when we think that applies. |
| Who reads it internally | The people working your request. It is not sold, syndicated, used to train a model, or published as market research. |
| What we publish | Nothing about your request. Aggregate findings about supplier capability may inform the catalogue, but never a customer requirement, a quantity, or an application. |
| Supplier confidentiality | Suppliers receive your specification under their own confidentiality terms. Where you need a signed agreement first, say so at the start and we will route it that way before circulating. |
| Deletion | On request, at any time, including after an order. |
How quotes are normalised
The comparison is the product. Raw supplier quotes are not comparable and pretending otherwise is the most common way a buyer is misled.
| Dimension | What suppliers do | What we restate it to |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | Per vial, per million cells, per tissue, per insert, per plate, per week of labour. | One unit that matches your requirement, with the conversion shown so you can check the arithmetic. |
| Quantity basis | Price breaks at different thresholds, minimum order quantities, pack sizes that do not divide evenly. | Your quantity, plus the next break above and below it, so you can see what a slightly larger order would cost. |
| Lead time start | Counted from order, from purchase order receipt, from payment, from cell delivery, or from design sign-off. | Business days from a single named start event, with the gating constraint stated — production cadence, courier window, permit, or a cell expansion that cannot be hurried. |
| QC scope | One supplier includes identity and sterility; another prices them separately; a third assumes you will test on receipt. | The same document list on every quote, with anything a supplier excluded shown as an added line rather than absorbed. |
| Non-recurring engineering | Tooling, mould design and protocol development are sometimes buried in a unit price, sometimes a separate charge. | Separated. First-article cost and repeat-run cost are shown as two numbers, because the second is the one that decides whether this is sustainable. |
| Freight and cold chain | Excluded, estimated, or included with no detail. | A stated line, with the shipping configuration named — dry ice, dry shipper, or wet ice at 4 °C on the supplier’s ship day. |
| Validity | Undated, or valid for a period nobody mentions. | An explicit expiry date on every line. |
When nothing can be sourced
This is a real and frequent outcome, and it is reported as a result rather than absorbed into a silence.
Some requests have no supplier today. Our own survey of roughly thirty organisations found that finished contractile muscle can be bought off a catalogue from one supplier, but that none publish a force acceptance criterion for it — so a construct specified to a force number still has no catalogue answer. When your requirement lands in that territory, you get the following, at no cost.
- A statement of who was asked and what they said. Named organisations, with declines and non-responses shown.
- The reason it failed. Capability, commercial posture, regulatory restriction, or geometry. These are different problems with different fixes.
- The nearest thing that does exist. Usually a different format, a fixed geometry instead of a custom one, or the same job split across two laboratories.
- What it would take. Where a requirement is an integration rather than an impossibility, we say which parts exist and which one is missing.
- A record. Failed searches inform the catalogue. A gap that recurs is a gap worth publishing.
Worked example
A 10 mm aligned skeletal muscle construct with loop anchors at both ends and a twitch acceptance of 500 µN cannot be bought from a catalogue anywhere. Every individual requirement, however, is inside demonstrated commercial capability: published validation on a commercial platform reports average twitch forces of 385 to 1156 µN and tetanic forces to 1660 µN.
So the honest answer is not no. It is: no supplier sells this, the biology is demonstrated, the custom part is the mould, and here is what an integration across a cell supplier, a microfabrication shop, a casting laboratory and a force-testing house would look like.
Smith et al., 2022, PMC9445471 · Wetware World supply landscape survey, 2026-09-01
When you should not use us
Six cases where the correct advice is to go somewhere else. We would rather lose the enquiry than the argument later.
You already have a supplier and a price you are happy with
Then keep them. An intermediary between you and a supplier you can already call is a cost with no function. Come back when you need something they do not make.
You need GMP or clinical-grade material
Everything routed through this site is research use only. We hold no quality system, no clinical qualification and no regulatory standing, and we will not pretend that a supplier’s certification is ours. Contract directly with a GMP manufacturer.
You need it in 48 hours
The fastest lines in the catalogue are cryopreserved cells at one to three weeks from order. Living tissue ships against a weekly production cadence. Nothing here is a next-day part, and any intermediary promising one is guessing.
The item is a small consumable you can buy directly
A published-price plate is a published-price plate. Skeletal muscle casting devices, for instance, are listed publicly at USD 440.00 for a pack covering eight experiments. If your requirement is one pack, buy it from the vendor. Our margin cannot earn itself on that transaction and we will say so.
You cannot describe what an acceptable batch looks like
Without an acceptance criterion, a quote is a guess and a delivery is an argument. If the measurement does not exist yet, that is a real project — say so and we will scope it as one, rather than pricing a fiction.
You want us to confirm a number for a grant without a real requirement
Ask for the published price evidence instead. It is on the catalogue entries, dated and sourced, and it costs nobody a supplier relationship.
Send the specification, not the enquiry
The catalogue holds 26 sourceable entries, 9 of them against published supplier prices. If yours is not among them, that is the interesting case.