← Every product built on public research
Bavarian Nordic · chikungunya vaccine, recombinant
Vimkunya: invented in a government lab, then Medicare paid $642K for it in 2025
$642K
Medicare paid, 2025
before rebates
$642K
Medicare, 2020–2025
$303 per patient in 2025
$295K
Medicare, 2026 Q1
the newest quarter CMS has published
–
Medicaid paid, 2024
before rebates
The public record, link by link
1 · Public research
Invented in NIH labs and licensed to Bavarian Nordic.2 · Patent
Patents 7635688, 7094598, 8106026, 8106027, 8124592, 9353353, 9487563, 10138277, 10369674, 11098084, 11364674, 11718647, 11992523, 12168675, 12281336, licensed by NIH.3 · FDA approval
Approved Feb 14, 2025, sold by Bavarian Nordic.4 · Public pays
Medicare paid $642K in 2025 for 2,119 patients.
What Medicare paid for Vimkunya
Plus $295K in the first quarter of 2026, for 995 patients.
The government license
NIH to Bavarian Nordic
VIMKUNYA(chikungunya vaccine, recombinant) is the first virus-like particle (VLP) single-dose chikungunya vaccine and the first chikungunya vaccine for individuals over the age of 12. It uses virus-like particles designed to mimic the chikungunya virus without the ability to infect cells, replicate or cause disease.
First sold 2025. Licensed patents: US 7635688, US 7094598, US 8106026, US 8106027, US 8124592, US 9353353, US 9487563, US 10138277, US 10369674, US 11098084, US 11364674, US 11718647, US 11992523, US 12168675, US 12281336. See the list
Bavarian Nordic'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, Bavarian Nordic received $1.08B in federal contracts and grants since fiscal 2020, which includes purchases. Bavarian Nordic's page shows its other products on this list, its federal awards, its PAC's giving and its lobbying. If Bavarian Nordic 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.