Cellosaurus Cell Lines Scraper

Structured cell-line metadata from Cellosaurus — the reference knowledge base of cell lines used in biomedical research. Get species, disease, sex, age, origin, STR profiles and 30+ database cross-references for any cell line, as clean JSON. No API key required.

Pricing: pay-as-you-go, roughly ~$0.5 per 1,000 cell lines. Cellosaurus data is licensed CC-BY-4.0.

Why this actor

Cell-line misidentification and cross-contamination is one of the biggest reproducibility problems in the life sciences. Every record this actor emits carries an is_problematic flag — set whenever Cellosaurus marks a line as "Problematic cell line" or Contaminated. That single field turns a bulk export into a research-integrity screen you can run over your whole lab inventory.

Use cases

• Cell line authentication — verify a line's identity, STR profile presence and known aliases before you trust an experiment.
• Cancer research — filter by is_cancer, disease (NCIt) and category to build cohorts of cancer cell lines with their DepMap ids.
• Reproducibility checks — screen your inventory against is_problematic to catch contaminated or misidentified lines.
• Lab inventory enrichment — map internal names to canonical CVCL accessions, species, and provider cross-references.

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	search (full-text queries) or accessions (explicit CVCL ids). Default search.
queries	array	Free-text queries. Prefilled ["HeLa","Jurkat","HEK293"]. Used in search mode.
accessions	array	Explicit CVCL ids, e.g. ["CVCL_0030"]. Used in accessions mode.
maxItems	integer	Max records to store. Default 200, max 3000.

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["HeLa", "Jurkat", "HEK293"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

Output

Each dataset item:

{
  "type": "cell_line",
  "accession": "CVCL_0030",
  "secondary_accessions": [],
  "name": "HeLa",
  "synonyms": ["HELA", "He-La", "Henrietta Lacks cells"],
  "category": "Cancer cell line",
  "sex": "Female",
  "age": "30Y6M",
  "species": "Homo sapiens (Human)",
  "species_accession": "9606",
  "disease": "Human papillomavirus-related endocervical adenocarcinoma",
  "disease_ncit": "C27677",
  "derived_from": null,
  "is_problematic": false,
  "is_cancer": true,
  "str_profile_present": true,
  "cross_references": [{"db": "DepMap", "accession": "ACH-001086"}],
  "depmap_id": "ACH-001086",
  "comment_count": 34,
  "web_pages": [],
  "url": "https://www.cellosaurus.org/CVCL_0030",
  "source": "cellosaurus",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-11T00:00:00Z"
}

All fields are nullable. cross_references is capped at 30 and web_pages at 5.

Related actors

• cBioPortal Scraper
• Clinical Trials Scraper
• UniProt Scraper
• Reactome Pathways Scraper

Data source & license

Data from Cellosaurus (SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics), licensed CC-BY-4.0. This actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with SIB.