← Every product built on public research
Aegerion Pharmaceuticals · metreleptin
Myalept: invented in a government lab, then Medicare paid $30M for it in 2025
$30M
Medicare paid, 2025
before rebates
$115M
Medicare, 2020–2025
$1.3M per patient in 2025
$7.7M
Medicare, 2026 Q1
the newest quarter CMS has published
$40M
Medicaid paid, 2024
before rebates
The public record, link by link
1 · Public research
Invented in NIH labs and licensed to Aegerion Pharmaceuticals Inc..2 · Patent
Patents 7183254, 8318666, licensed by NIH.3 · FDA approval
Approved Feb 25, 2014, sold by Aegerion Pharmaceuticals.4 · Public pays
Medicare paid $30M in 2025 for 23 patients; Medicaid paid $40M in 2024.
What Medicare paid for Myalept
Plus $7.7M in the first quarter of 2026, for 24 patients.
The government license
NIH to Aegerion Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Myaylept (metreleptin) is an adjunct to diet as a replacement therapy to treat the complications of leptin deficiency in patients with congenital or acquired generalized lipodystrophy. Lipodystrophy is a rare disorder characterized by loss or lack of adipose tissue resulting in the deficiency of the hormone leptin, produced by fat cells and is associated with severe metabolic abnormalities including severe insulin resistance, diabetes, hypertriglyceridemia and fatty liver disease.
First sold 2014. Licensed patents: US 7183254, US 8318666. See the list
Aegerion 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. Aegerion Pharmaceuticals's page shows its other products on this list, its federal awards, its PAC's giving and its lobbying. If Aegerion 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.