ClinicalTrials.gov Pipeline Monitor: New Trials, Phase & Status Alerts

Watch a condition, drug, sponsor or phase on ClinicalTrials.gov and get back only what changed since your last run: new trials, phase transitions, status changes, sponsor changes. Give it a watchlist, schedule it, and it reports (and charges) only for genuinely new or changed trials, not the same list every day. Data comes straight from the official ClinicalTrials.gov v2 REST API, no key required.

Built for competitive-intelligence and pharma/biotech teams, clinical research organizations, patient-advocacy groups, biotech investors, and AI agents (works out of the box via API and MCP).

Why this actor

• One watchlist, a real diff: most trial "APIs" and exports hand you the full result set every time and leave deduplication to you. This one keeps a persistent memory of what it has already seen and returns only new trials plus the ones whose status, phase or sponsor moved.
• Change types you can route on: every monitor row is tagged new, status-changed (with the previous status), phase-changed or sponsor-changed, so you can alert on "went to recruiting" or "advanced to Phase 3" specifically.
• Official source, no key, no scraping: every field comes from the ClinicalTrials.gov v2 API (clinicaltrials.gov/api/v2/studies). No login, no third-party mirror.
• Flat schema, no JSON spelunking: nctId, title, status, phase, study type, lead sponsor, conditions and dates as plain columns, plus a direct study link.
• Monitor mode with a Slack-compatible webhook digest: schedule it and get pinged only when the pipeline actually moves.
• Fair pricing: you pay per trial actually returned. A quiet day on a scheduled watchlist costs nothing beyond the flat run fee.

Use cases

• Competitive intelligence: watch a competitor's drug or a target indication and get alerted when a new trial appears or an existing one advances a phase.
• Biotech / pharma investors: track a sponsor's whole pipeline and catch status changes (recruiting, completed, terminated) as they post.
• Clinical research organizations: monitor a therapeutic area for newly recruiting studies to source sites and referrals.
• Patient advocacy: watch a condition and surface trials that just opened for enrollment.
• AI agents: plug it into Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, "any new Phase 2 small cell lung cancer trials this week?"

Input

{
    "conditions": ["small cell lung cancer"],
    "overallStatus": ["RECRUITING"],
    "phases": ["PHASE2"],
    "locations": ["Boston"],
    "maxStudies": 50
}

Provide at least one of conditions, terms or sponsors so the query is scoped. conditions maps to the API's condition search, terms to free-text (drug or intervention names), sponsors to lead sponsor/collaborator. phases, overallStatus, locations and studyType narrow the results further.

Input	What it does
conditions	Conditions / diseases; multiple entries are OR-combined
terms	Free-text drug or intervention names
sponsors	Lead sponsor or collaborator names
phases	EARLY_PHASE1, PHASE1, PHASE2, PHASE3, PHASE4
overallStatus	RECRUITING, COMPLETED, TERMINATED, …
locations	City, state, country or facility name — only trials with a site there. Multiple entries are OR-combined
studyType	INTERVENTIONAL or OBSERVATIONAL; empty for both
maxStudies	Hard cap on studies collected per run
monitorMode	Return only new or changed trials since the last run
webhookUrl	Slack-compatible endpoint for the monitor-mode digest

Watch the trials your patients or your sites can actually reach. locations maps to the registry's own location search (query.locn) — city, state, country or facility name — so a CRO sourcing sites in New England or an advocacy group pointing patients at trials in France stops paying for the other 95% of the world. Measured live: diabetes alone returns 24,297 studies, diabetes + Boston returns 724, diabetes + Boston or Paris returns 1,064.

Monitor mode example (for a scheduled run):

{
    "sponsors": ["Bayer"],
    "phases": ["PHASE1", "PHASE2", "PHASE3"],
    "overallStatus": ["RECRUITING", "ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING"],
    "monitorMode": true,
    "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/xxx/yyy/zzz"
}

Accepted phases: EARLY_PHASE1, PHASE1, PHASE2, PHASE3, PHASE4. Accepted overallStatus values include RECRUITING, NOT_YET_RECRUITING, ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING, COMPLETED, TERMINATED, SUSPENDED, WITHDRAWN, UNKNOWN. studyType is INTERVENTIONAL or OBSERVATIONAL (leave empty for both).

Output (one record per new or changed trial)

{
    "nctId": "NCT03996473",
    "title": "A Study of Radium-223 in Combination With Pembrolizumab...",
    "url": "https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03996473",
    "overallStatus": "TERMINATED",
    "phase": "PHASE1",
    "studyType": "INTERVENTIONAL",
    "leadSponsor": "Bayer",
    "conditions": ["Non-small Cell Lung Cancer"],
    "startDate": "2020-03-06",
    "lastUpdatePostDate": "2024-10-10",
    "changeType": "new",
    "previousStatus": null,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-07T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Field	Meaning
nctId	The trial's ClinicalTrials.gov identifier
title	Brief title
url	Direct link to the study page
overallStatus	Recruitment / overall status (RECRUITING, COMPLETED, TERMINATED...)
phase	Trial phase(s), joined (e.g. PHASE1, PHASE2); null for observational studies
studyType	INTERVENTIONAL or OBSERVATIONAL
leadSponsor	Lead sponsor name
conditions	Conditions / diseases studied
startDate / lastUpdatePostDate	Study start and last-update-posted dates
changeType	Monitor mode: new, status-changed, phase-changed or sponsor-changed; null on one-off runs
previousStatus	The prior status when changeType is status-changed; else null
scrapedAt	When this run fetched the trial

On a one-off run (monitorMode off) you get every match with changeType set to null. In monitor mode the first run seeds the baseline and reports everything as new; later runs return only new or changed trials.

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription. These prices are the whole bill: all platform usage (compute, storage) is included, so what you see is what a run costs. Users on higher Apify plans get automatic discounts.

Event	Price	When
Run started	$0.001	Flat, once per run
Trial found	$0.01	Per new/changed trial returned with its data
Digest sent	$0.03	Monitor mode only, per Slack/webhook digest actually posted

A thousand trials costs $10, and in monitor mode a quiet watchlist costs essentially nothing: the persistent seen-set means you are never billed twice for the same unchanged trial, so a scheduled run that finds no changes only pays the $0.001 run fee. That is the difference from a raw scraper that bills you for the whole result set on every run.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? The official ClinicalTrials.gov v2 REST API (clinicaltrials.gov/api/v2/studies). It is public, keyless and open, so there is no login, no scraping and no third-party aggregator.

How is this different from just querying the API myself? The API returns the full matching set on every call. This actor remembers what it already showed you and returns only new trials plus the ones whose status, phase or sponsor changed, tagged with the exact change. That is the difference between a query and a monitor.

How do I get alerted when a trial starts recruiting or advances a phase? Turn on monitorMode, add a Slack (or any) webhook URL, and schedule the actor. You get a digest only when something in your watchlist actually changes, and you are only charged for changed trials.

Can I watch a whole sponsor's pipeline? Yes, put the sponsor name in sponsors and leave conditions empty. Combine with phases and overallStatus to narrow it.

Can I filter by phase and status? Yes. phases accepts EARLY_PHASE1 through PHASE4; overallStatus accepts the API's status values (RECRUITING, COMPLETED, TERMINATED, and so on). Both are optional.

Can I watch trials only in my city or country? Yes. Put the place in locations — a city (Boston), a state (Texas), a country (France) or a facility name (Mayo Clinic). Multiple entries are OR-combined, so ["Boston", "Paris"] returns trials with a site in either.

Why did my run return nothing? The run's status message tells you which of five different things happened, from what the run actually counted: ClinicalTrials.gov never answered; it answered but a control query with no filters at all reported an empty registry (an API-side change, ours to fix); it answered normally and no registered study matches your watchlist; the monitor seeded its baseline; or the monitor found nothing changed. Only the third is a reason to widen your filters, and only that one says so.

Does it work with AI agents? Yes. Like every Apify actor it is exposed via REST API and MCP, so Claude, Cursor and similar tools can call it directly, for instance to answer "list new Phase 2 melanoma trials from this month".

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Something missing?

If you need an extra field, another source, or a different output, open an issue on this Actor and describe it. I read every request and small additions usually ship within days. More monitors and data Actors are on my profile.

Related actors

• openFDA Recall Monitor — the other side of the same product's life: drug, device and food recalls and enforcement reports from the openFDA API, with the same new-since-last-run diff.
• FDA Warning Letters — FDA warning letters by company and subject.
• Federal Register Monitor — new FDA (and any agency) rules, proposed rules and notices.

Keywords: ClinicalTrials.gov API, clinical trials monitor, clinical trial tracker, NCT lookup, trial phase change alert, recruiting trials alert, clinical trial status monitor, pharma pipeline monitoring, competitor drug pipeline tracking, sponsor pipeline tracker, biotech competitive intelligence, drug trial monitoring, clinical trials for AI agents, MCP, ClinicalTrials.gov v2 API.