← Every product built on public research
Roche · voretigene neparvovec-rzyl
Luxturna: invented in a government lab
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Medicare paid, 2025
before rebates
–
Medicare, 2020–2025
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Medicare, 2026 Q1
the newest quarter CMS has published
$4.9M
Medicaid paid, 2024
before rebates
The public record, link by link
1 · Public research
Invented in NIH labs and licensed to Spark Therapeutics.2 · Patent
Patent 7419817, licensed by NIH.3 · FDA approval
Approved Dec 18, 2017, sold by Roche.4 · Public pays
Medicaid paid $4.9M in 2024. Medicare's 2025 drug files do not list it.
The government license
NIH to Spark Therapeutics
Luxturna (voretigene neparvovec-rzyl) is a new gene therapy to treat children and adult patients with an inherited form of vision loss that may result in blindness. Luxturna is the first directly administered gene therapy approved in the U.S. that targets a disease caused by mutations in a specific gene.
First sold 2018. Licensed patents: US 7419817. See the list
Roche'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, Roche received $1.36B in federal contracts and grants since fiscal 2020, which includes purchases. Roche's page shows its other products on this list, its federal awards, its PAC's giving and its lobbying. If Roche 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.