NIH RePORTER Scraper - Grants & Investigators

What does NIH RePORTER Scraper do?

US biomedical research funding as one row per principal investigator — with institution, city, state, UEI, award amount and funding window.

No login. No API key. No proxies.

One row per person, not per project

NIH RePORTER returns a project with its investigators buried in a nested array. For anyone selling into research — lab equipment, reagents, CRO services, software, recruitment — that is the wrong shape. A programme with four principal investigators is four people to contact, at a named institution, with a known budget.

Measured on FY2025 Alzheimer's research:

	Value
Investigators per project	2.73
Contacts lost by exporting per project	63 %
Co-investigators as a share of contacts	55 %
Rows carrying institution UEI and city	99–100 %

Turn on Contact investigator only and you get the single person NIH corresponds with — a shorter, higher-authority list. Leave it off and you reach the co-investigators too, who run much of the actual work.

Output

Field	Example
investigatorName	Benjamin Levine Ebert
investigatorTitle, isContactPi	PROFESSOR, true
organization	DANA-FARBER CANCER INST
orgCity, orgState, orgZip, orgCountry	Boston, MA
orgUei, orgDuns	federal identifiers, join to USAspending
departmentType	SCHOOLS OF MEDICINE
awardAmountUsd	12713161
projectNumber, projectTitle	5P01AG052350-08
projectStartDate, projectEndDate	funding window
activityCode, awardType, fundingAgency	P01, NIA
researchTerms	indexed topic terms, flattened
projectUrl	link to the RePORTER record

projectEndDate is the one to sort by for outreach: a grant ending in nine months is a renewal conversation, and a budget about to be re-spent.

orgUei is the same identifier USAspending uses, so this output joins directly to federal contract data.

Input

{
  "searchText": "Alzheimer",
  "fiscalYears": [2025],
  "maxItems": 500
}

Field	Default	Notes
searchText	Alzheimer	Titles, abstracts and indexed terms
fiscalYears	[2025]	NIH years run October to September
maxItems	500	Counts investigators, not projects
contactPiOnly	false	Only the corresponding investigator
orgStates	—	e.g. ["CA", "MA"]
organizations	—	Exact names as NIH spells them
piLastName	—	One investigator
minAwardUsd	—	Filters small awards

Use cases

• Life-science sales — territory lists by topic and state, with the researcher, the institution and the budget.
• CRO and service business development — who is funded to run what, and until when.
• Competitive and landscape analysis — which institutions dominate a research area, and at what scale.
• Recruitment — named investigators and their titles by speciality.
• Grant strategy — what NIH actually funds in a field, with amounts.

Limits, honestly

• RePORTER stops paginating past 15,000 projects. The Actor warns rather than looping; narrow the topic, year or state to reach deeper.
• searchText matches abstracts and indexed terms, so a broad word returns adjacent research. Check projectTitle and researchTerms on the rows.
• awardAmountUsd is the amount for that project record in that fiscal year, not the lifetime value of a multi-year programme — and it repeats on each investigator row of the same project. Deduplicate on projectNumber before summing.
• Institution names are not normalised at the source: Harvard appears both as HARVARD UNIVERSITY and HARVARD UNIVERSITY D/B/A HARVARD….
• Names and titles are personal data published on a public federal registry. Using them for outreach in the EU or UK makes you the data controller.
• Requests are paced out of courtesy to a free public service.
• Not affiliated with the NIH.

How much does it cost?

You pay per investigator returned: $0.006 each, that is $6.00 per 1,000. There is no start fee, and subscription plans pay less per investigator.

The example input below asks for up to 500 investigators, so it costs $3.00 at most.

If a run reaches the spending limit you set, the output stops at that limit and never goes past it. You are never charged for rows that were not delivered.

Use NIH RePORTER Scraper as an API

Call it from your own code with the Apify client, here in Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("DataIO/nih-reporter-funded-investigators").call(run_input={
    'searchText': 'Alzheimer',
    'fiscalYears': [2025],
    'maxItems': 500,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

It also works from JavaScript, Make, Zapier, n8n, and from AI agents through the Apify MCP server.

Other actors you might like

• FDA 510(k) Scraper: Device Clearances Data
• FDA Recalls Scraper: openFDA Enforcement
• NPI Registry Scraper: US Healthcare Providers

FAQ

Is it legal to use this data?

The actor reads public data from its official source, without logging in and without bypassing any access control. What you do with the data, for example contacting people listed in it, is your responsibility under the laws that apply to you, such as GDPR in Europe.

Can I run it on a schedule?

Yes. Create a schedule in Apify Console, daily or weekly for example, and each run delivers a fresh dataset, which you can send by email, webhook or integration.

Can AI agents use it?

Yes. It is available through the Apify MCP server, and every input field is described in its input schema, so an agent can call it directly.