Research Lab Finder: Funded Labs by Topic (NIH, NSF, PubMed)

Research Lab Finder: Funded Labs by Topic (NIH, NSF, PubMed)

Research Lab Finder finds the labs actually working on a research topic right now, from the money trail rather than keyword-matched web pages. It searches NIH RePORTER and NSF Award Search for active grants on your topics, groups them by principal investigator and institution, totals their funding, and can attach each PI's latest PubMed papers on the topic.

Built for tech-transfer and licensing teams, biotech/pharma BD and search & evaluation, VCs and scouts, life-science tool and reagent sales, recruiters, and researchers looking for collaborators.

• One row per lab (PI + institution): title, department, city/state, matched topics, number of grants, total funding, funders (e.g. NIH NCI, NSF CHE), when the latest grant ends, top 5 grants with links.
• Labs that match more of your topics rank first, then by funding.
• Filters: active grants only (default), US states, minimum funding.
• Add-on (off by default): up to 5 recent PubMed papers per PI on your topics, with DOI and link.
• No emails or phone numbers are collected, even though NSF's API exposes them.

No login, no API key, no proxies: documented public government APIs, called politely with an identifying User-Agent.

Use it as an NIH RePORTER scraper / API alternative, an NSF award search export, a principal investigator finder or a research collaborator and KOL search tool: search by topic (e.g. CRISPR base editing, perovskite solar, Alzheimer's tau), filter by state and funding, and export labs to CSV, Excel, JSON or your CRM.

Why this one

	This Actor	Typical paper or Scholar scraper
Unit of output	Lab (PI + institution) with funding	Individual papers
Signal of real activity	Active federal grants + $	Citations / keyword hits
Sources	NIH RePORTER + NSF + PubMed	One site, often scraped
Multi-topic ranking	Labs matching more topics first	No
Privacy	No contact data	Often scrapes emails

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	When
Lab row	$0.004	Each lab returned
Recent papers add-on	+$0.003 per lab	Only if addRecentPapers is on
Actor start	$0.00005	Apify's standard start event

How that compares: paper and Scholar scrapers on the Store cost about $1–$5 per 1,000 papers, and you'd still need to dedupe authors, find affiliations and work out who is funded. A lab row is already that finished lead, so a top-50 lab list costs $0.20 ($0.35 with papers).

Billing examples: no incremental mode; you pay per lab returned: 50 labs = $0.20; 50 labs with papers = $0.35; a run with no matching labs = start event only. Set Max charge per run to cap spend.

Input examples

Gene-editing labs with active funding and recent papers:

{ "topics": ["base editing", "prime editing"], "addRecentPapers": true, "maxItems": 50 }

Perovskite solar groups in California (NSF only):

{ "topics": ["perovskite solar"], "sources": ["nsf"], "states": ["CA"] }

Output (one row)

piName, piTitle, institution, department, city, state, country, matchedTopics, grantCount, totalFunding, funders, latestGrantEnds, topGrants[] (source, id, title, amount, start, end, funder, url), nihPortfolioUrl, sources, plus recentPapers[] and recentPaperCount with the add-on.

Abstracts and co-investigators

Each entry in topGrants includes an abstractExcerpt (the first ~400 characters of the official NIH RePORTER or NSF abstract) and coInvestigators (the other named PIs on that grant). Each lab row also has a combined coInvestigators list (up to 20). Names only: NSF co-PI email addresses are removed, and former co-PIs are left out.

Notes

• totalFunding sums, per lab, the latest fiscal-year award amount of each matched NIH project and the obligated amount to date of each NSF award. These are different measures (annual vs cumulative), so treat the total as a rough funding signal, not a comparable dollar figure.
• No double counting of repeat years or subprojects: NIH lists a project once per fiscal year and lists multi-component subprojects under the same core number. Records are collapsed to one grant per core project number (e.g. R01CA123456), keeping the latest fiscal year, and a grant matching several of your topics is counted once.
• Funding is not a purchasing budget. Grant money is mostly committed to salaries, indirect costs and planned work; a large award doesn't mean the lab can or will buy your product or service.
• PubMed author matching uses surname + first initial plus your topics, so common names can occasionally pull a paper from someone else; check the links.
• Labs are keyed on the contact PI; other named PIs on each grant appear in coInvestigators (see below).

FAQ

How do I find which labs are working on a research topic? Enter one or more topics (e.g. "prime editing", "solid-state batteries"). The Actor searches active NIH and NSF grants for those terms and returns one row per lab (principal investigator + institution), ranked by how many of your topics they match and by funding.

Is this an NIH RePORTER scraper? It uses the official, documented NIH RePORTER API v2 and NSF Award Search API, not page scraping, so results are stable and complete. PubMed papers come from NCBI E-utilities.

Does it return PI email addresses or phone numbers? No. It's a deliberate privacy choice: NSF contact emails are stripped. You get names, titles, departments, institutions and grant links, which is usually enough to find the lab's public page.

Can I filter by state, funding amount or funding agency? Yes: states (US two-letter codes), minTotalFunding, sources (nih, nsf) and activeOnly (on by default).

How much does it cost? $0.004 per lab row ($4 per 1,000 labs), plus $0.003 per lab only if you turn on recent PubMed papers. 50 labs with papers cost about $0.35.

Can I export to CSV, Excel or a CRM, or schedule it? Yes. Download results as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, call it from the Apify API, Zapier, Make or MCP-compatible AI agents, and schedule weekly runs to catch newly funded labs.

Who uses it? Tech-transfer and licensing offices, biotech and pharma business development (search & evaluation), venture scouts, life-science tool and reagent sales teams, recruiters and academics looking for collaborators.

Data sources and legal notes

• NIH RePORTER API v2: public, documented, no key; spaced at about 1 request per second as NIH asks.
• NSF Award Search API: public, documented, no key.
• NCBI E-utilities (PubMed), add-on only: documented public API with tool and email as NCBI asks, under 3 requests per second; bibliographic metadata only.
• U.S. government data is public domain. Not affiliated with or endorsed by NIH, NSF or NLM.

Disclaimer

Data is provided as is from public registries and can lag or contain errors. It isn't investment, legal or scientific advice. Treat researchers professionally: use this for legitimate research, partnering, licensing and hiring, follow anti-spam laws (CAN-SPAM, GDPR) when you reach out, and don't use it to harass anyone.

Support

Found a problem or want another funder (DOE, DoD, EU CORDIS) added? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab. More Clearfeed Labs data feeds: clearfeedlabs.com.

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