Global Corporate & Patent Intelligence

One Actor, four public sources for patent disputes, clinical-trial and drug-patent data, and the Singapore company register. Pick the sources for each run and receive only the records that are new or changed since your last run, as clean JSON in the dataset.

Typical users: IP and litigation teams watching patent disputes, pharma competitive-intelligence analysts, KYC and onboarding teams that need register changes, and market researchers.

What is covered

Source id	What it reads	Scope to know before you rely on it
uspto_ptab	USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board trial proceedings (IPR, PGR, CBM, DER) through the USPTO Open Data Portal, newest petition first	Bring your own key: needs your USPTO Open Data Portal API key (usptoOdpApiKey).
epo_opposition	EPO Open Patent Services legal-status lookup, reporting opposition-family legal events	Watchlist-driven. You supply the EP publication numbers to look up (epWatchlist in sourceOptions); the Actor does not search for all oppositions. An empty or invalid list fails preflight. Bring your own keys: epoOpsConsumerKey and epoOpsConsumerSecret.
clinicaltrials_orange_book	ClinicalTrials.gov v2 studies (newest update first) and FDA Orange Book products with patent and exclusivity data (openFDA)	Choose clinicaltrials, orange_book or both through subSources. Optional filters include sponsors, keywords and condition. An optional openFDA API key raises openFDA's limits.
sg_acra	Singapore ACRA register of corporate entities from data.gov.sg (monthly extract in 27 first-letter shards), newest registrations first	The default shard is A only; list the shards you need in shardSelection. Optional ssicCodeFilter and entityStatusFilter. Released under the Singapore Open Data Licence.

Not available (held): ae_registers (ADGM's register service has answered every search with a server error, System.NullPointerException in RASearchUtil.getSearchResponseForPR, since at least 2026-09-17, from Apify's cloud and from elsewhere, and no row has ever been obtained; the DIFC register is disallowed by the site's robots.txt and Dubai mainland licences need an approval). A held source cannot be selected: the input form does not list it, and the platform rejects an API call that names one as invalid input before a run starts, so nothing is charged. Should one ever reach the Actor, the run stops before any request to a source is made and before any record is billed; the platform still charges the start event of a run that has started.

How to use it

1. Open the Input tab and choose one or more sources. Start with one. The form is prefilled with a small snapshot (deltaMode: "all", 10 records per source) so that the first run shows data at once; for a scheduled Task set deltaMode to onlyChanged and raise maxItemsPerSource.
2. Add the credentials the source needs (see "Credentials").
3. Run it. The first run of a source treats every record it reads as new (see "Control your spend" below).
4. Put the same input in a Task and attach an Apify Schedule. Each Task keeps its own delta memory, so later runs deliver only what changed.
5. Read the results from the dataset, the Apify API, or an Apify webhook/integration.

Example input:

{
  "sources": ["clinicaltrials_orange_book"],
  "sourceOptions": {
    "clinicaltrials_orange_book": { "sponsors": ["Pfizer"] }
  },
  "deltaMode": "onlyChanged",
  "maxItemsPerSource": 200,
  "watchlistNames": ["Pfizer"]
}

Each source validates its own slice of sourceOptions and rejects unknown keys, so a typo fails the run in preflight instead of being ignored.

Delta modes

deltaMode	Delivers
onlyChanged (default)	Records seen for the first time, and records whose content or status changed
onlyNew	Records seen for the first time
all	Every record, unchanged ones included (tagged delta_status: "unchanged")

Delta memory is kept per stateNamespace (default: one per Task) in a key-value store named global-corporate-patent-intelligence-delta-state in your account. Give two Tasks that run at the same time different namespaces: a second concurrent run of the same namespace and source is refused. A run that is killed (timeout, abort, out of memory) cannot release its lease, so a restart on the same namespace is refused until 15 minutes after that run's last heartbeat (the refused run still pays the start event); a new namespace would start from an empty memory and deliver, and bill, everything again. To restart a source from scratch, delete its state.<namespace>.<source> and journal.<namespace>.<source> records.

Output

Every dataset row carries engine, source, record_id, delta_status, is_new, is_watchlist_match, matched_watchlist_keyword and scraped_at, plus the fields of the source. A RUN_SUMMARY record in the key-value store lists per-source counts, warnings and watchlist accounting.

A run ends FAILED when preflight finds a problem (an unknown or held source, a missing credential, an invalid option) before any request, or when every selected source failed and nothing was delivered. If at least one source answered, the run succeeds and the per-source errors stay on RUN_SUMMARY: check it in automated pipelines.

Watchlist

watchlistNames is a list of keywords matched case-insensitively as substrings against each record's names (parties, sponsors, entity names and similar). Entries shorter than three characters (letters or digits, not counting punctuation), blank or punctuation-only entries are ignored; with no valid keyword nothing matches. A matching record is flagged is_watchlist_match and billed a Watchlist hit event on top of its row event. Two hard ceilings apply per run: maxWatchlistHitsPerRun (default 200) and maxWatchlistSpendUsd (default 50). Use broad keywords with care.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. The Pricing tab shows the current price of every event; prices are deliberately not repeated on this page so that it cannot go out of date.

• Actor start: charged per GB of memory the run is configured with. This Actor uses 1 GB, so each run starts one start event.
• One row event per delivered record, named by source: Patent enforcement proceeding (uspto_ptab and epo_opposition); Clinical trial / Orange Book record (clinicaltrials_orange_book); New Singapore ACRA entity and Updated Singapore ACRA entity (sg_acra).
• Watchlist hit: see above.

With deltaMode: "all" every delivered record is billed, unchanged ones at the source's "Updated" event (or its only row event). Records that are not delivered are not billed a row event. Your own API keys are used against the publishers' services; any fees or limits on those keys are between you and the publisher.

Control your spend

• The first run of a source delivers up to maxItemsPerSource records (default 500, range 1 to 10,000) and bills each one. Registers can be large; for a trial set a low value such as 20.
• Use Apify's maximum-cost-per-run setting as an additional ceiling. When the limit is reached the run stops cleanly and RUN_SUMMARY says so (stoppedOnChargeLimit). The platform refuses a limit below the start event plus the most expensive single event of the Actor and names the minimum in its error.
• Keep deltaMode at onlyChanged for scheduled runs.

Reliability notes

Delivery is at-least-once: a progress checkpoint is written every 25 rows and a small journal after every row that was delivered and billed, so after a hard kill at most the one record in flight can be delivered and billed again. A memory record that exists but cannot be read fails its own source instead of being treated as empty.

Credentials

Field	Used by
usptoOdpApiKey	uspto_ptab
epoOpsConsumerKey, epoOpsConsumerSecret	epo_opposition
fdaApiKey (optional)	clinicaltrials_orange_book

All are stored encrypted by Apify and never logged. A source whose required credential is missing fails preflight before any request to a source and before any record is billed (the start event of the run is still charged).

Data sources and licences

Records are published by the USPTO, the European Patent Office, ClinicalTrials.gov (US National Library of Medicine), the US FDA (openFDA) and the Singapore Government's data.gov.sg (Singapore Open Data Licence). Reuse terms are those of each publisher: check them for your use case.

Disclaimer

This Actor reads public sources and reports what they publish. It is not legal, medical or investment advice. Patent legal-status and register data can lag or be corrected upstream: confirm deadlines and statuses on the official register before you rely on them.

Support

Questions and bug reports: the Issues tab of this Actor (https://apify.com/stefano_seggio/global-corporate-patent-intelligence/issues/open).