Funded-Lab Sales Radar — Who's Funded to Work on X

NIH hands out roughly 60,000 grants a year — each one a public record of a named principal investigator, at a named institution, with a specific budget, working on a specific topic right now. Lab-equipment vendors, CRO business development teams, and academic recruiters build this list by hand today, from journal articles and conference badges.

NIH RePORTER already has all of it — structured, free, no key, no login. This turns "who's funded to work on X" from a research chore into a ranked, contactable lead list.

How it works

Searches NIH's own RePORTER v2 API by topic across project titles, terms, and abstracts, then ranks results by funding tier (award size) and funding freshness (how much runway is left) — a sales-relevant signal, not a research one. A well-funded grant that just started has years of unspent budget; that's the lead worth prioritizing.

Input

{ "topics": ["CRISPR screening"], "fiscalYears": "2025", "activeOnly": true }

Sample output

{
  "matchedTopic": "CRISPR screening",
  "projectNumber": "5P30DK020579-48",
  "piName": "Jane Q. Researcher",
  "institution": "WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY",
  "institutionState": "MO",
  "awardAmount": 473761,
  "fundingTier": "substantial",
  "fundingFreshness": "just_started",
  "fiscalYear": 2025,
  "reporterUrl": "https://reporter.nih.gov/search/results?projectNum=5P30DK020579-48"
}

Typical uses

• Lab-equipment sales prospecting — find labs funded to buy the kind of instrument you sell, before your competitor's rep does.
• CRO business development — surface newly-funded studies that will need contract research services.
• Academic recruiting — find well-funded labs actively hiring in a specific research area.

Pricing

$4.00 / 1,000 results ($0.004 per lead).

⚠️ Read before you act

• Matching is NIH's own full-text search, not a strict keyword filter — skim the abstract excerpt before reaching out. A topic match doesn't guarantee the project is your exact use case.
• Funding tier and freshness are signals, not guarantees. A "major" tier grant with years of runway is a strong lead; verify budget status directly before a high-stakes pitch.
• Only NIH-funded research is covered. NSF, DOE, and private foundation grants are out of scope for this actor.

FAQ

• Do I need an NIH account or API key? No — the RePORTER API is completely free and keyless.
• Can I search multiple topics at once? Yes — each topic in the list runs as a separate search, results merged and deduplicated by project number.
• What does activeOnly do? Restricts results to grants with runway left. Turn it off to include closed-out historical grants too.

Related actors

• Grant/RFP Opportunity Radar — the same "official public database as a lead list" pattern, for federal contract opportunities via SAM.gov.
• SEC EDGAR Filings — another official-data-as-signal actor, for material corporate events instead of research funding.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Funded-Lab Sales Radar — Who's Funded to Work on X declares all 20 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Funded-Lab Sales Radar include matchedTopic, projectNumber, title, piName, coInvestigators and institution.
• Funded-Lab Sales Radar needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of Funded-Lab Sales Radar's 6 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Funded-Lab Sales Radar documents fundingTier as: Funding tier, where a programme publishes bands.
• Every number published about Funded-Lab Sales Radar is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Funded-Lab Sales Radar is filed under developer tools and business so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Funded-Lab Sales Radar reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.