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Amgen · palifermin
Kepivance: invented in a government lab, then Medicare paid $114K for it in 2025
$114K
Medicare paid, 2025
before rebates
$114K
Medicare, 2020–2025
–
Medicare, 2026 Q1
the newest quarter CMS has published
$61K
Medicaid paid, 2024
before rebates
The public record, link by link
1 · Public research
Invented in NIH labs and licensed to Amgen Inc..2 · Patent
Patents 5654405, 5665870, 5707805, 5731170, 5741642, 6420531, 6709842, 6833132, 7026291, licensed by NIH.3 · FDA approval
Approved Dec 15, 2004, sold by Amgen.4 · Public pays
Medicare paid $114K in 2025; Medicaid paid $61K in 2024.
What Medicare paid for Kepivance
The government license
NIH to Amgen Inc.
Kepivance(palifermin) is a human keratinocyte growth factor protein produced using recombinant DNA technology. It is used to decrease the incidence and duration of severe mouth sores in patients with hematologic cancers who receive myelotoxic therapy. In such a therapy, the patients' myeloid cells are first destroyed by chemotherapy alone or in combination with radiation, and then reconstituted with a bone marrow transplant. Kepivanceis the first and only therapy to treat the severe mouth sores that afflict these patients as a painful and unavoidable side effect of the treatment.
First sold 2005. Licensed patents: US 5654405, US 5665870, US 5707805, US 5731170, US 5741642, US 6420531, US 6709842, US 6833132, US 7026291. See the list
Amgen's side
Drug makers pay for the clinical trials that take a compound from the lab to FDA approval, and they pay royalties on licensed patents. Those terms are not public. Separately, Amgen received $853M in federal contracts and grants since fiscal 2020, which includes purchases. Amgen's page shows its other products on this list, its federal awards, its PAC's giving and its lobbying. If Amgen wants to add its account, we will publish it here.
How this is built. A product is listed for one of two public records. Either NIH's Technology Transfer office lists it as an FDA-approved product built on a license from an NIH, CDC or FDA lab, or a patent the FDA lists for the drug was reported to NIH as an invention made with NIH grant money, as the Bayh-Dole Act requires. We then add what Medicare Part D, Part B and Medicaid paid for each product, and for each company, the federal grants and contracts it received, its PAC's donations and its lobbying.
What the numbers mean. Medicare and Medicaid figures are gross spending before the rebates drug makers pay back, which are confidential. Hospital-administered therapies such as CAR-T cell treatments are mostly paid under Medicare Part A and do not appear in these files. "NIH grants" is everything NIH paid on the grants a patent was reported under, from 1985 on; a grant usually paid for more than one invention, so it is not the cost of the drug. Federal contracts include purchases, such as vaccine doses, as well as research. Companies also paid for the clinical trials that took these products to approval. None of these figures shows that public money set a price or bought a decision.
Sources: NIH Technology Transfer: FDA-approved products licensed from NIH, CDC and FDA labs; NIH RePORTER patents reported under NIH grants (from iEdison); NIH RePORTER project funding; FDA Orange Book patent, exclusivity and product files; CMS Medicare Part D and Part B Spending by Drug (annual and quarterly); CMS Medicaid Spending by Drug; USAspending.gov federal grants and contracts. Updated 2026-11-06.