Clinical Trials — ClinicalTrials.gov Registry

Search the world's clinical trials and get one flat row per study. Phase, status, sponsor, enrolment, interventions, eligibility and sites, extracted from eight nested modules of the ClinicalTrials.gov record.

What it does

ClinicalTrials.gov is the US National Library of Medicine's registry of clinical studies. Its API returns each study as eight nested modules with arrays inside arrays, which is accurate and hard to use in a spreadsheet.

This Actor searches the registry and flattens each study into one row with 47 fields. Search by condition, sponsor, free text, or specific NCT numbers.

What you get

47 fields per row, including nct_id, title, status, phases, study_type, lead_sponsor, sponsor_class, enrollment, enrollment_type, conditions, interventions, start_date, completion_date, countries_count, eligibility criteria, and the registry dates.

The table view shows 14 of them; all 47 are in the JSON, CSV and Excel downloads.

Input

Field	Meaning
condition	Medical condition, for example type 2 diabetes.
searchTerm	Free-text search across the record.
sponsor	Sponsor name.
statuses	Restrict to statuses such as RECRUITING or COMPLETED.
nctIds	Specific NCT numbers, fetched directly.
maxStudies	Stop after this many. 0 removes the cap.

{
  "condition": "type 2 diabetes",
  "statuses": ["RECRUITING"],
  "maxStudies": 200
}

Sample output

One record, trimmed to the fields shown in the table view:

{
  "nct_id": "NCT01904032",
  "title": "Sunshine 2 Study for Women With Diabetes",
  "status": "COMPLETED",
  "phases": "PHASE2",
  "study_type": "INTERVENTIONAL",
  "lead_sponsor": "Loyola University",
  "enrollment": 265,
  "enrollment_type": "ACTUAL",
  "conditions": "Diabetes | Depression | Quality of Life",
  "interventions": "Vitamin D3 | Vitamin D3 comparator",
  "start_date": "2013-11-21",
  "completion_date": "2018-08-31",
  "countries_count": 1,
  "issues": ""
}

Multi-valued fields are joined with | so that a row stays a row in CSV and Excel.

Pricing

Event	Per 1,000	Notes
Study	$2.00	One charge per study returned

Every trial registered for diabetes is about $48. There is no start fee and no per-row dataset fee.

What it does not do

This is not medical advice and not a source for clinical decisions. It is the registry, flattened. Records are supplied by sponsors and the registry does not verify them.

No results data. The registry holds posted results for some studies. This Actor returns the study record, not the outcome measures.

enrollment is a promise until it is not. enrollment_type says which: ESTIMATED is what the sponsor planned, ACTUAL is what happened. Summing the two together produces a number that means nothing.

Registry entries go stale. Sponsors are required to update them and many do not. issues marks status_not_verified_recently on records the sponsor appears to have abandoned.

Observational studies have no phase. phases is null for those, and NA where the study is interventional but not phased. The two are different.

Notes

Filter on enrollment_type before summing patients. It is the difference between what happened and what someone hoped would happen.

sponsor_class separates industry from academia and government, which is usually the first cut in any analysis.

Search by sponsor to map a competitor's pipeline; search by intervention to find everyone testing the same thing.

For pipeline analysis status_not_verified_recently is noise. For finding stalled programmes it is the signal.

Support

Open the Issues tab with the NCT number and the field that looks wrong.

Licence and attribution

Trial records from ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the US National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. As a work of the US federal government it carries no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. NLM does not endorse this Actor.