ANVISA Medicine Scraper 💊

Extracts complete data on registered medicines from ANVISA (Brazil's National Health Surveillance Agency), including commercial presentations, domestic and international manufacturers, ATC classification, therapeutic class, and registration holder details.

Why this Actor?

ANVISA's consultation portal is protected by a WAF (Cloudflare + Dynatrace), which blocks direct HTTP calls to the API — any request without valid session cookies gets a 403 Forbidden.

This Actor solves the problem using Playwright (a real headless browser) that:

1. Resolves WAF challenges automatically — Cloudflare and Dynatrace are handled as part of normal browser navigation
2. Intercepts JSON responses from the internal API — more robust than CSS selector scraping, won't break if the UI changes
3. Returns complete, structured data — same depth of data available in each medicine's detail panel

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
startDate	string	No	7 days ago	Start date of the publication period (DD/MM/YYYY)
endDate	string	No	Today	End date of the publication period (DD/MM/YYYY)
cnpj	string	No	—	Registration holder's CNPJ (digits only). Filters by holder
nomeProduto	string	No	—	Product name text search (partial match supported)
maxPages	integer	No	0	Listing page limit (0 = unlimited, each page = 10 products)
maxRequestsPerCrawl	integer	No	1000	Safety limit for HTTP requests per run

Input examples

{
    "startDate": "01/04/2025",
    "endDate": "30/04/2025",
    "maxPages": 1
}

Search for a specific registration holder:

{
    "startDate": "01/01/2025",
    "endDate": "30/06/2025",
    "cnpj": "00000000000100"
}

Search by product name:

{
    "nomeProduto": "paracetamol",
    "maxPages": 3
}

Output

Each dataset item is a Medicine object with the following structure:

{
    "anvisaRegistrationId": "100000001",
    "tradeName": "EXEMPLOMAX",
    "activeIngredient": "PARACETAMOL",
    "referenceMedicine": "TYLENOL",
    "atcCodes": ["N02BE01"],
    "therapeuticClasses": ["ANALGÉSICOS"],
    "regulatoryCategory": "Genérico",
    "registrationHolder": {
        "legalName": "PHARMA EXEMPLO LTDA.",
        "cnpj": "00000000000100",
        "authorizationNumber": "1000001"
    },
    "approvalDate": "2025-04-28",
    "expiryDate": "2035-04-28",
    "processNumber": "25351000000202500",
    "presentations": [
        {
            "registrationId": "1000000010010",
            "description": "500 MG COM CT BL AL PLAS INC X 20",
            "pharmaceuticalForms": ["COMPRIMIDO SIMPLES"],
            "routesOfAdministration": ["ORAL"],
            "destinations": ["Comercial"],
            "publicationDate": "2025-01-15",
            "validity": "54",
            "manufacturers": [
                {
                    "name": "FÁBRICA EXEMPLO S.A.",
                    "address": "RUA DAS INDÚSTRIAS, 123 - CIDADE/SP",
                    "country": "BRASIL",
                    "manufacturingStage": "FABRICAÇÃO DO PRODUTO TERMINADO",
                    "uniqueCode": "X000001"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
anvisaRegistrationId	string	ANVISA registration number (up to 13 digits)
tradeName	string	Trade name (brand)
activeIngredient	string	Active pharmaceutical ingredient (API)
referenceMedicine	string|null	Reference (innovator) medicine
atcCodes	string[]	ATC codes (WHO classification)
therapeuticClasses	string[]	ANVISA therapeutic classes
regulatoryCategory	string	Regulatory category (Generic, Similar, New, Biological)
registrationHolder	object	Registration holder company (legalName, cnpj, authorizationNumber)
approvalDate	string	Registration/approval date (YYYY-MM-DD)
expiryDate	string	Registration expiry date (YYYY-MM-DD)
processNumber	string	ANVISA administrative process number
presentations	array	Commercial presentations (dosage, packaging, manufacturers)

Each presentation contains:

Field	Type	Description
registrationId	string	Presentation registration code
description	string	Full description (dosage + form + packaging)
pharmaceuticalForms	string[]	Pharmaceutical forms
routesOfAdministration	string[]	Approved routes of administration
destinations	string[]	Commercial destination (Commercial, Hospital, etc.)
publicationDate	string	Official Gazette publication date (YYYY-MM-DD)
validity	string	Shelf life in months
manufacturers	array	Manufacturers (domestic and international, unified)

Each manufacturer contains:

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Legal name
address	string	Manufacturing plant address
country	string	Country (BRASIL for domestic)
manufacturingStage	string	Manufacturing process stage
uniqueCode	string	Unique code in the ANVISA system

How it works

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  1. Playwright navigates to the ANVISA SPA              │
│     → WAF (Cloudflare/Dynatrace) resolved               │
│     → Session cookies captured by the browser            │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  2. DEFAULT route: Paginated listing API                 │
│     → fetch() via browser context (with WAF cookies)     │
│     → Filters out NOTIFICADO (notified-only) products    │
│     → Enqueues DETAIL for each REGISTERED product        │
│     → Next page if available                             │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  3. DETAIL route: Per-product detail API                 │
│     → fetch() via browser context (with WAF cookies)     │
│     → Maps JSON to Medicine structure                    │
│     → Saves to Dataset via pushData()                    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The scraper does not rely on CSS selectors — it intercepts JSON responses from the internal API that ANVISA's own Angular SPA consumes. This makes extraction resilient to visual changes in the portal.

🔌 Integration & API

You can easily integrate this Actor into your own data pipelines, backend applications, or BI tools using the Apify API.

Starting the Actor via REST API

Trigger a run by sending a POST request to the Apify API, passing your parameters in the JSON body:

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_USERNAME~anvisa-raw-material-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "startDate": "01/04/2025",
    "endDate": "30/04/2025",
    "maxPages": 1
  }'

Note: Replace YOUR_USERNAME~anvisa-raw-material-scraper with your actual Actor ID and provide your Apify API Token.

Fetching the Results

Once the run finishes, download the extracted data (in JSON, CSV, or Excel format) directly from the run's dataset:

$curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/DATASET_ID/items?format=json"

For more details on integrating Apify Actors via Node.js, Python, or REST, refer to the official Apify API documentation.

Tech stack

• Crawlee — Web scraping framework
• Playwright — Browser automation
• Apify SDK — Actor platform
• TypeScript — Strict typing

Limitations and considerations

• Rate limiting: The crawler runs with a max concurrency of 3 to be respectful to ANVISA's servers
• WAF: In rare cases, the WAF may require manual CAPTCHA solving. The automatic retry (3 attempts) usually handles it
• Proxy: In production on Apify, using a proxy is recommended to avoid IP-based blocks. The Actor attempts to configure a proxy automatically and works without one if no credits are available
• Data volume: Each listing page contains 10 products. For long date ranges, the volume can be large — use maxPages to limit during testing.

License

ISC