NIH Grants Tracker

Pull NIH grant awards from RePORTER. Filter by agency, institution, PI, fiscal year, or keyword. Free official NIH API. No API key required.

This actor uses the official NIH RePORTER public API to extract grant award data with full structured metadata. Tested on real data: returns 11,830 active NCI cancer grants for FY2026, 360 NIAID mRNA vaccine grants, 4,886 CRISPR-related grants over $1M.

What you actually get

Real grants returned in test runs:

Project	PI	Org	Award
Therapeutic editing for cardiovascular diseases	Musunuru, Kiran	University of Pennsylvania	$1,137,435
Drug Research Organoid-Integrated Development Platform	Johnson, Erik Christopher	Johns Hopkins University	$2,946,887
Defective HIV-1 proviral abundance in children	Persaud, Deborah	Johns Hopkins University	$779,616
Optimizing cAMP and PKA sensors for neuron dissection	Baconguis, Isabelle	Oregon Health & Science University	$2,039,804

Each row includes:

• Project number, core project number, application ID
• Project title and full abstract (optional)
• Principal investigator (full name, first/last)
• Organization (name, city, state, country, dept type)
• Total cost USD, direct cost, indirect cost
• Fiscal year, funding mechanism, activity code (R01, R13, etc.)
• Project start/end dates and budget periods
• CFDA code, congressional district
• Opportunity number (NIH PA / RFA codes)
• Pre-categorized scientific terms list (~100+ subject keywords per grant)
• Direct link to the NIH RePORTER project detail page

Why use this

The NIH funds ~50,000 research grants per year, totaling ~$45 billion. Knowing who got funded for what — and when — is a leading indicator for:

• Biotech analysts and investors — early signal on academic research that could become commercial IP, acquisition targets, or licensing opportunities
• Grant writers and research offices — see what got funded recently in your field, what NIH program officers are funding, what grant mechanisms are working
• Competitive intelligence — track which institutions and which PIs are accumulating funding in your domain
• Sales teams targeting biotech / pharma — find labs with fresh funding (= budget for new tools and reagents)
• Journalists — break stories on controversial or surprising grants
• Academic researchers — find collaborators, grant mentors, and program officer contacts

Commercial alternatives (NIH RePORTER itself is free, but most users want structured exports + filters + scheduling):

• GrantForward: ~$300+/year per seat
• Pivot (ProQuest): ~$2,000+/year institutional
• Grants Discovery (Lex Machina): ~$5,000+/year
• Grant Watch: $200-1,000/year
• NIH RePORTER itself is free but UI-only (no bulk export, no scheduling, no API integration without writing your own code)

This actor delivers all the same data with structured JSON output and pay-per-event pricing.

Honest limitations

• It only covers NIH (not NSF, DARPA, DOE, USDA, etc.). For other agencies you'll need different actors.
• Funding mechanism filtering is keyword-based, not by mechanism code. If you need fine-grained mechanism filtering, use the activity code field downstream.
• Active projects only by default. Closed/completed projects are excluded. If you need historical data, you can pull by fiscal year going back to the 1980s.
• No subaward data. RePORTER returns the prime award; subawards have their own dataset that's not exposed here.
• The terms list is pre-categorized by NIH and includes some odd entries (e.g. "Walking Sticks" appearing in a cancer grant). Don't blame us — that's how NIH categorizes them.

How to use

1. Click Try for free (or Start)
2. Pick agencies to filter (e.g. ["NCI"] for cancer, ["NIAID"] for infectious disease, [] for all NIH)
3. Pick fiscal years (e.g. ["2026"])
4. Optionally add search terms (full-text search across title + abstract)
5. Optionally filter by PI names or organization names
6. Optionally set min award amount to skip small grants
7. Set max results (default 100, max 10,000)
8. Click Start

Common NIH agency codes

Code	Institute
NCI	National Cancer Institute
NIAID	National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
NIMH	National Institute of Mental Health
NHLBI	National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
NINDS	National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
NICHD	Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
NIA	National Institute on Aging
NIDDK	National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
NIDA	National Institute on Drug Abuse
NIGMS	National Institute of General Medical Sciences
NEI	National Eye Institute
NIDCR	National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research
NIBIB	National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
NIAMS	National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases
NICDS	National Institute of Communication Disorders and Stroke
NIEHS	National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Pass empty list [] to get all NIH institutes.

Output

{
    "projectNumber": "1R01CA290000-01A1",
    "coreProjectNumber": "R01CA290000",
    "projectTitle": "Therapeutic editing for cardiovascular diseases",
    "agency": "CA",
    "agencyName": "National Cancer Institute",
    "fiscalYear": 2026,
    "principalInvestigator": "Musunuru, Kiran",
    "piFirstName": "Kiran",
    "piLastName": "Musunuru",
    "piEmail": null,
    "organizationName": "UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA",
    "organizationCity": "PHILADELPHIA",
    "organizationState": "PA",
    "organizationCountry": "UNITED STATES",
    "organizationDeptType": "MEDICINE",
    "totalCostUsd": 1137435,
    "directCostUsd": 700000,
    "indirectCostUsd": 437435,
    "fundingMechanism": "Research Project Grants",
    "activityCode": "R01",
    "awardType": "1",
    "projectStartDate": "2026-04-01T00:00:00",
    "projectEndDate": "2031-03-31T00:00:00",
    "budgetStart": "2026-04-01T00:00:00",
    "budgetEnd": "2027-03-31T00:00:00",
    "opportunityNumber": "PA-25-302",
    "isActive": true,
    "applicationId": 11392345,
    "cfdaCode": "93.398",
    "congressionalDistrict": "PA-03",
    "spendingCategories": ["Genetics", "Cardiovascular"],
    "terms": ["Address", "CRISPR-Cas9", "Cardiovascular Diseases", "Editing", "Gene Therapy"],
    "abstractText": "Cardiovascular diseases remain the leading cause of death...",
    "publicHealthRelevance": "...",
    "projectUrl": "https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11392345",
    "extractedAt": "2026-04-15T21:30:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event pricing — the model that matches actual usage cost:

• Actor start: $0.05 per run
• Per grant extracted: $0.01 per grant pushed to the dataset

Example costs:

• 100 grants for a quick competitive scan → $1.05
• 1,000 grants for a department-wide audit → $10.05
• 10,000 grants for a full multi-agency CRISPR portfolio analysis → $100.05
• Daily snapshot of 50 fresh NCI grants → $0.55/day = $16.50/month

For comparison: GrantForward charges $300+/year for similar functionality with limited search.

Free Apify tier members get $5/month in platform credits, which covers ~500 grants per month.

Tips

• Schedule weekly runs to track new awards in your competitive area — diff the snapshots downstream
• Filter by congressionalDistrict in your downstream pipeline to find grants in specific regions for sales targeting
• Use the terms field for semantic clustering — NIH pre-categorizes every grant with relevant keywords
• Combine with the SEC EDGAR Filing Monitor to triangulate biotech funding signals across NIH grants + SEC filings of public biotech companies
• Use minAwardAmount: 1000000 to focus only on R01 + program project grants (which signal serious R&D investment)
• Start with searchTerms for the broadest filter, then narrow with agencies and organizationNames

API source

This actor uses the official NIH RePORTER REST API v2 (https://api.reporter.nih.gov/v2/projects/search). The API is free, public, requires no authentication, and is maintained by the NIH itself. No rate limit issues encountered in normal use.

License

This actor is MIT licensed. The data it returns is from the NIH and is in the public domain (works of the US federal government are not subject to copyright). You may use the extracted grant data for any purpose, including commercial use, with no restrictions.