iPSC line suppliers and banks: a directory organised around the licence, not the price

The short answer: there are 9,308 registered human pluripotent stem cell lines and 1,071 registered providers, and the number that matters to anyone building a product is much closer to zero. Almost every line in this directory is distributed under an agreement that permits research and stops at the point where research becomes a product, and the stopping point is written into a different document for every bank.

So this directory is organised around the licence rather than the price. The fee is knowable, small, and rarely the reason a project fails. The licence is frequently unknowable until you ask, is line-specific rather than bank-specific, and is the reason a project fails eighteen months in.

The scale of what exists

The human pluripotent stem cell registry publishes a running census, and it is worth reading before concluding that a line does not exist. As of its 1 September 2026 status post:

The month-on-month movement is the more useful figure. The 1 August 2026 post recorded 8,049 hiPSC lines against 8,173 a month later — roughly 124 new hiPSC lines registered per month, and six new providers. This is not a scarce resource. Finding a line with your genotype is a search problem. Finding one you are allowed to commercialise a derivative of is a legal problem, and the two are routinely confused.

hPSCreg is a registry, not a distributor. It will tell you a line exists, who made it and what it is characterised as; it will not sell it to you. Start there, then come to the table below for who actually ships.

The directory

The commercial multiplier is real, published, and small

Two banks publish both tiers, and the ratio is the most useful number on this page:

• Coriell: $1,187 academic against $1,878 commercial — 1.58×.
• RIKEN: JPY 63,140 academic against JPY 126,280 for-profit — exactly 2.00×, and the same clean doubling applies to every resource class RIKEN distributes, from general cell lines (45,320 / 90,640) to organoids (92,840 / 185,680).

Note what this multiplier is and is not. It is the distribution fee — the cost of the bank recovering its banking, QC and shipping effort from a commercial user instead of a public one. It is not a commercial licence. Paying RIKEN’s for-profit tier gets a company a tube on for-profit terms; it does not grant rights to the underlying reprogramming patents, and RIKEN charges the Clontech licence fee as a separate line item to make exactly that distinction visible.

The practical consequence: if a supplier quotes you a commercial price and does not mention a licence, that silence is not permission. The two are priced separately by the organisations that are careful about it.

RIKEN is also unusually explicit about what counts as for-profit use, and the definition is broader than most buyers assume. It covers research by for-profit organisations; collaborative research between a for-profit and a non-profit; research by a non-profit that is outsourced and sponsored by a for-profit; and for-profit research by a not-for-profit organisation including R&D with the aim of patent acquisition. A university lab intending to file a patent is on the commercial tier under that definition. That is worth reading twice before ordering on the academic rate.

Where the real constraint sits: iPS Academia Japan

Two independent distributors in this directory — one a US federal repository, one a commercial vendor — name the same organisation as the licensor of the underlying technology.

Coriell records on the GM23338 line page that purchasers are responsible for any limited use label licences applicable to the line, and that the applicable LULL for that line is iPS Academia, Japan Inc. BPS Bioscience states on its cardiomyocyte product page that commercial use of the cells is not allowed and requires an appropriate licence from iPS Academia Japan.

This is the single most important fact in this directory, and it is easy to miss because it appears in the remarks field of a catalogue record rather than in a licensing document. The reprogramming technology sitting underneath a large fraction of the world’s iPSC lines is patent-encumbered, the encumbrance follows the line, and it follows derivatives made from the line.

Three things follow:

1. A LULL named on a line record is a finding, not a footnote. It tells you an obligation exists and who holds it. It does not tell you the cost, the terms, or whether a licence is available at all for your intended use.
2. Absence of a named LULL is not absence of an obligation. Coriell names it because Coriell is careful. A vendor that names nothing may have cleared it, or may simply not be telling you.
3. Reprogramming method is a sourcing criterion. Lines reprogrammed by different routes carry different encumbrances. GM23338 is recorded as retrovirally reprogrammed. Episomal, Sendai and mRNA routes have different patent landscapes and different downstream terms. If commercialisation is anywhere in your plan, the derivation method belongs in the specification alongside the genotype.

The full treatment of what this means for building a product is in cell line licensing for commercial use.

What each bank actually gives you beyond a tube

Coriell publishes the deepest single-line record

For GM23338, all of the following is on one public page: donor sex and age at sampling (male, 55 years), race, country of origin, biopsy source (skin), reprogramming method (retroviral), passage frozen (35), karyotype (ISCN 46,XY[20]), the split ratio, temperature, CO₂ and oxygen conditions, the medium (mTeSR1), the substrate (Matrigel), the characterisation battery — viability, surface antigen expression, alkaline phosphatase activity, pluripotency by embryoid body formation, and real-time PCR of undifferentiated iPSC against embryoid bodies — plus a certificate of analysis, the LULL, related products from the same subject, and a list of publications that used the line.

The related-products list deserves attention on its own. GM23338 is cross-referenced to GM23248 (the parent fibroblast), GM20431 (a lymphoblast line from the same subject), NA23248 (DNA) and HM23338 (high molecular weight DNA). Matched material from one donor across four sample types is available as catalogue items. The record also honestly notes that the parent fibroblast expansion was mosaic for a translocation that is no longer present in the stem cell — a disclosure that complicates the sale and belongs on the page.

Passage 35 is worth pausing on. That is not a low-passage line, and for a bank supplying a reference line to hundreds of labs it is the right trade — but it is a fact you should know before assuming karyotypic headroom.

EBiSC solves the contracting problem, not the cost problem

The EBiSC structure is the most buyer-friendly in the directory for one specific reason: a single EBiSC Access and Use Agreement covers lines from different distributors. Anyone who has assembled a panel of lines from five institutions and signed five MTAs will recognise what that is worth. The fee is not cheap — GBP 1,442 per vial for BIONi015-A, GBP 1,160 for the EBiSC-NEUR1 neurons — but the transaction cost is where iPSC panels actually bleed time.

EBiSC’s catalogue is scoped usefully: healthy controls, diagnosed disease lines, and isogenic sub-clones, from male and female donors spanning ages 0 to 89, covering more than 45 diseases across neurodegenerative, neurological, cardiac, liver, eye, blood, kidney and skeletomuscular disorders. Stock is held at Fraunhofer IBMT in Sulzbach under a fully automated cryobanking system with a self-contained low-temperature cool chain.

Two honesty markers worth crediting. First, EBiSC publishes a certificate of analysis and user protocol for the latest released batch while stating plainly that it cannot guarantee batch-specific delivery — a real limitation most banks leave you to discover. Second, its data governance is explicit: non-identifiable data is open access, and anything that constitutes personal data under GDPR is available only through the EBiSC Data Access Committee.

EBiSC also does something no other bank in this table does: it sells pre-differentiated cells alongside lines. EBiSC-NEUR1 is a cryopreserved iPSC-derived neuron product with published staining data at 14 days post-thaw on poly-ornithine/laminin for MAP2, NeuN and DAPI. For a group that wants neurons rather than a differentiation programme, a non-profit bank at GBP 1,160 per vial belongs in the comparison against the commercial suppliers in iPSC neuron suppliers.

WiCell is a bank and a test house, and its ordering model is the constraint

WiCell distributes over 1,500 lines including hESC, iPSC and cGMP lines, but online ordering is open to academic and nonprofit organisations only, and every order triggers documents specific to the line ordered — an MOU-SLA or an MTA plus possible ancillary agreements — signed by someone authorised to bind the institution, usually tech transfer or legal.

That is not obstruction. WiCell distributes on behalf of many different providers, and the terms belong to the provider, not to WiCell. But it means the lead time on a WiCell line is set by your own institution’s signature cycle, not by WiCell’s shipping. Start the paperwork the day you pick the line.

The other half of WiCell is a characterisation business that is directly useful whoever you buy from: karyotype, FISH, STR, SNP, flow cytometry, oncopanel and mycoplasma, at research and cGMP grade. Buying a line from one organisation and having it independently authenticated by another is good practice, and there is a clean argument for the test house not being the manufacturer. What that costs is in cell QC testing cost.

WiCell also publishes the single most practically useful piece of matrix guidance we found anywhere, and it is vendor-independent: Matrigel is a basement membrane extract; Cultrex is interchangeable with Matrigel in WiCell’s protocols; Geltrex would need to be optimised; and vitronectin, laminin or other protein matrices may work but may need a ROCK inhibitor for attachment. That is a supplier- neutral statement that three leading BMEs are not drop-in substitutes, which matters enough that it is covered in hydrogel and ECM suppliers.

The public-versus-commercial decision

The banks and the commercial vendors are not competing on the same axis, and choosing between them on price alone is the common error.

Buy from a public bank when the donor genotype or disease is the point, when you need a matched isogenic control that already exists, when you need matched material from one donor across sample types, or when you need the provenance record to survive review. Public banks publish more, cost less, and take longer because of the paperwork.

Buy from a commercial vendor when you need consistency, a supported product, a matched medium that the datasheet performance was measured in, and a supply agreement rather than an MTA. You pay more per vial and you get a shorter path from purchase order to bench.

Buy from neither when what you actually need is a differentiated cell type at scale, in which case a differentiation programme against a line you have cleared is the route — see custom iPSC differentiation.

What we would ask before ordering any iPSC line

1. Which reprogramming method was used, and which patents attach to it.
2. Whether a limited use label licence applies, who holds it, and whether the distributor will name it in writing.
3. What the agreement permits for derivatives — differentiated cells made from the line — as distinct from the line itself.
4. Passage number at distribution, and the karyotype at that passage.
5. Whether the certificate of analysis is batch-specific or representative, and whether batch-specific delivery can be guaranteed.
6. Whether a matched isogenic control exists and can be reserved on the same schedule.
7. Whether matched material from the same donor exists in other formats.
8. Which fee tier your intended use falls into — and specifically, whether patent-directed research by a non-profit counts as commercial under that bank’s definition.
9. Which medium and matrix the line was banked and released on, because substituting either is a protocol change.
10. For anything heading toward a clinic: whether a GMP-grade equivalent line exists at all, because for most research lines it does not.

Related pages

The commercialisation question in full is cell line licensing for commercial use. What the research-use restriction actually means is in RUO vs GMP cells. If you want neurons rather than lines, iPSC neuron suppliers is the deep dive, and custom iPSC differentiation covers having it done for you.

We maintain this directory because we broker across it. We hold no distribution agreement with any bank listed and nothing here has been paid for. We have not obtained a licence from any patent holder named on this page and we do not represent one — if your project needs one, that is a conversation with the holder, and we will tell you that rather than route you somewhere convenient.