🧪 ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper: Trials, Sponsors & Pipeline Data

Overview

ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper searches the US National Library of Medicine's global trial registry and returns clean, structured JSON. Filter by condition, drug or intervention, sponsor, recruitment status, and location; get NCT ID, title, phases, enrollment, eligibility criteria, key dates, lead sponsor, collaborators, and every study site. Built for pharma and biotech competitive intelligence, patient recruitment, and life-sciences data pipelines.

ClinicalTrials.gov holds 480,000+ studies, and its API v2 is powerful but deeply nested. Each study is a tree of protocol section modules (identification, status, sponsor, design, arms, contacts, locations, eligibility) with token-based pagination. This actor walks that tree for every record and hands you one flat, analysis-ready record per study.

✅ No API key | ✅ Fully open (official API v2) | ✅ Zero charge on empty runs | ✅ First 10 studies free | ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Features

Targeted search by condition, intervention, sponsor, location, or free-text term, with recruitment-status filtering. Every field flattened: NCT ID, title, status, study type, phase, conditions, interventions, sponsor, enrollment, eligibility, key dates, direct study link. Optional full site list: facility, city, state, and country for every study location. Token pagination handled automatically, from a handful of trials to tens of thousands per run. Fully open access via the official ClinicalTrials.gov API v2, so there is no key, no login, and no anti-bot friction.

How it works

The actor calls the ClinicalTrials.gov API v2 with your filters, then walks each study's protocol section modules to flatten identification, status, sponsors, design, arms, interventions, eligibility, and locations into a single record. Token pagination is handled internally, so you can pull anywhere from 1 to 10,000 studies in one run.

Empty searches are recognized before charging: a search that matches zero trials costs zero. When includeLocations is on, the actor attaches the full array of study sites for downstream geographic or recruitment analysis.

🧾 Input configuration

{
  "condition": "breast cancer",
  "intervention": "pembrolizumab",
  "status": ["RECRUITING", "ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING"],
  "maxResults": 200,
  "includeLocations": true
}

📤 Output format

{
  "nct_id": "NCT02896335",
  "title": "Palbociclib and Pembrolizumab in CNS Metastases",
  "overall_status": "RECRUITING",
  "study_type": "INTERVENTIONAL",
  "phases": ["PHASE2"],
  "conditions": ["Metastatic Malignant Neoplasm to Brain"],
  "interventions": [{ "type": "DRUG", "name": "Palbociclib" }],
  "lead_sponsor": "Massachusetts General Hospital",
  "sponsor_class": "OTHER",
  "collaborators": [],
  "enrollment": 45,
  "start_date": "2017-03-01",
  "primary_completion_date": "2026-12-01",
  "completion_date": "2027-06-01",
  "sex": "ALL",
  "minimum_age": "18 Years",
  "healthy_volunteers": false,
  "location_count": 3,
  "location_countries": ["United States"],
  "study_url": "https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT02896335",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-10T15:00:00.000Z"
}

Every study record contains these fields:

Field	Description
🆔 nct_id	ClinicalTrials.gov identifier
📝 title	Brief study title
🚦 overall_status	Recruitment status (RECRUITING, COMPLETED, etc.)
🔬 study_type	INTERVENTIONAL or OBSERVATIONAL
🧪 phases[]	Trial phases (PHASE1, PHASE2, PHASE3, PHASE4)
🩺 conditions[]	Diseases or conditions studied
💊 interventions[]	Drug, device, biologic, or procedure names with type
🏢 lead_sponsor	Primary sponsor name
🏛️ sponsor_class	Sponsor category (INDUSTRY, NIH, OTHER)
🤝 collaborators[]	Collaborating organizations
👥 enrollment	Actual or planned participant count
📅 start_date	Study start date
🏁 completion_date	Estimated or actual completion date
⚧ sex	Eligible sex (ALL, MALE, FEMALE)
🎂 minimum_age	Youngest eligible age
🌍 location_countries[]	Countries with study sites
🔗 study_url	Direct link to the trial page
🕒 scraped_at	ISO timestamp of capture

💼 Common use cases

Pharma and biotech competitive intelligence Track every trial a competitor sponsors, by drug, phase, and status, and watch their pipeline move. Map all active trials for a target, mechanism, or disease area.

Patient recruitment and site selection Find recruiting trials by condition and location to support site selection or patient matching. Enable includeLocations for facility and city detail across countries.

Investment and diligence Monitor trial status changes (recruiting to completed to terminated) as catalysts. Assemble structured cohorts of studies with eligibility and enrollment for portfolio review.

Research and meta-analysis Build filtered corpora for systematic reviews with eligibility criteria and enrollment ready to analyze. Schedule saved searches to capture new or updated trials automatically.

🚀 Getting started

1. Open the actor and enter a Condition (e.g. diabetes) or an Intervention (e.g. semaglutide), or both.
2. Optionally add a Sponsor, Location, or free-text Search term to narrow the pull.
3. Pick the Study statuses you want (default: RECRUITING); leave empty for every status.
4. Set Max results (default 100), and toggle Include locations if you need the full site list.
5. Click Save & Start, then download as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull via API or MCP.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. The ClinicalTrials.gov API v2 is fully open. You do not need to register anywhere.

How current is the data? Real-time. The actor reads the live registry, so newly posted and updated studies appear immediately.

Can I get all the study sites? Yes. Turn on includeLocations to attach facility, city, state, and country for every location on every study.

Which statuses can I filter by? Recruiting, not yet recruiting, enrolling by invitation, active (not recruiting), completed, suspended, terminated, withdrawn, and unknown.

How am I charged? Pay per study delivered at $0.003 per study, with the first 10 studies free for life on every Apify account. Runs that return zero studies are never charged.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP agent

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/clinicaltrials-scraper

Or call it programmatically with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('themineworks/clinicaltrials-scraper').call({
  condition: 'diabetes',
  status: ['RECRUITING'],
  maxResults: 100,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

🛠️ Complete your life-sciences pipeline

Trials are one dataset. Add the rest of the biomedical stack:

• ClinicalTrials.gov Bulk Exporter: bulk-friendly export with eligibility text for AI or systematic reviews.
• openFDA Scraper: FDA adverse events (FAERS), recalls, drug labels, and device 510k data.
• OpenAlex Scraper: 250M+ scholarly papers with citations, authors, and abstracts for background research.

Typical flow: pull recruiting trials for a compound, cross-check FAERS for post-market signals, and pair with OpenAlex for the underlying literature.

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the actor's Apify Console page or reach out through the Apify profile.