As a concrete setting where stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) are able to model real phenomena, we propose a stochastic Meinhardt model for cell repolarisation and study how parameter estimation techniques developed for simple linear SPDE models apply in this situation. We establish the existence of mild SPDE solutions and we investigate the impact of the driving noise process on pattern formation in the solution. We then pursue estimation of the diffusion term and show asymptotic normality for our estimator as the space resolution becomes finer. The finite sample performance is investigated for synthetic and real data.