← Every product built on public research
Apellis Pharmaceuticals · Pegcetacoplan
Syfovre: patented from NIH-funded research, then Medicare paid $455M for it in 2025
$455M
Medicare paid, 2025
before rebates
$943M
Medicare, 2020–2025
$14K per patient in 2025
$111M
Medicare, 2026 Q1
the newest quarter CMS has published
$7.5M
NIH grants behind the patents
whole-grant totals, not the drug's cost
The public record, link by link
1 · Public research
2 NIH grants to University of Pennsylvania, $7.5M in all.2 · Patent
7888323, 7989589, 9169307, reported to NIH under R01AI030040, R01GM062134.3 · FDA approval
Approved Feb 17, 2023, sold by Apellis Pharmaceuticals (NDA 217171).4 · Public pays
Medicare paid $455M in 2025 for 32,363 patients; Medicaid paid $8.8M in 2024.
What Medicare paid for Syfovre
Plus $111M in the first quarter of 2026, for 24,406 patients.
The grants
Structural analysis of the third component of complement
R01AI030040 · University of Pennsylvania · NIAID · 1993–2016
$5.1M
Design of Novel Complement Inhibitors
R01GM062134 · University of Pennsylvania · NIGMS · 2001–2010
$2.5M
The patents
- FDA-listed expiry Dec 4, 2027
- FDA-listed expiry Dec 4, 2027
- FDA-listed expiry Nov 18, 2027
Apellis Pharmaceuticals'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. Apellis Pharmaceuticals's page shows its other products on this list, its federal awards, its PAC's giving and its lobbying. If Apellis Pharmaceuticals 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.