ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper

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Scrape the US government clinical-trial registry — 500,000+ studies spanning interventional trials, observational studies, and expanded-access programs across 220+ countries. Search by free-text, condition, intervention, location, or sponsor; look up by NCT ID; filter by recruitment status, phase, study type, demographic eligibility, and date ranges. HTTP-only via the public ClinicalTrials.gov REST API v2 — no authentication, no cookies, no proxy required.

What this actor does

• Six modes: search, byNctIds, byCondition, byIntervention, byLocation, bySponsor
• Server-side filters: status, phase, study type, country (passed directly to the API)
• Client-side filters: sex, age groups, start / completion date ranges, has-results, keyword substring
• Cursor pagination: scales to thousands of records per run
• Polite-pool: identifies itself via User-Agent header with contact email
• Empty fields are omitted — no null, "", [], or {} in the output

Output per study (sample)

{
"nctId":"NCT04280705",
"briefTitle":"Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT)",
"officialTitle":"A Multicenter, Adaptive, Randomized Blinded Controlled Trial...",
"organization":"National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)",
"overallStatus":"COMPLETED",
"startDate":"2020-02-21",
"completionDate":"2020-05-21",
"leadSponsor":"National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)",
"conditions":["COVID-19"],
"keywords":["Adaptive","COVID-19","Efficacy","Multicenter"],
"studyType":"INTERVENTIONAL",
"phases":["PHASE3"],
"enrollmentCount":1062,
"allocation":"RANDOMIZED",
"interventionModel":"PARALLEL",
"primaryPurpose":"TREATMENT",
"interventionNames":["Placebo","Remdesivir"],
"interventionTypes":["OTHER","DRUG"],
"locationCountries":["United States","Japan","Korea, Republic of","..."],
"locationCount":73,
"hasResults":true,
"studyUrl":"https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04280705",
"recordType":"clinicalTrial",
"scrapedAt":"2026-05-21T11:53:00+00:00"
}

Available fields

• Identification: nctId, briefTitle, officialTitle, acronym, organization, organizationClass, orgStudyId
• Status & dates: overallStatus, startDate, startDateType, primaryCompletionDate, completionDate, studyFirstSubmitDate, studyFirstPostDate, lastUpdateSubmitDate, lastUpdatePostDate, resultsFirstPostDate, statusVerifiedDate, hasExpandedAccess
• Sponsors: leadSponsor, leadSponsorClass, collaborators[], responsiblePartyType, responsiblePartyInvestigator
• Oversight: isFdaRegulatedDrug, isFdaRegulatedDevice, hasDataMonitoringCommittee
• Description: briefSummary, detailedDescription
• Conditions: conditions[], keywords[]
• Design: studyType, phases[], enrollmentCount, enrollmentType, allocation, interventionModel, primaryPurpose, masking
• Arms / interventions: armGroups[], interventions[], interventionNames[], interventionTypes[]
• Eligibility: eligibilityCriteria, sex, minimumAge, maximumAge, standardAges[], healthyVolunteers
• Outcomes: primaryOutcomes[], secondaryOutcomes[]
• Locations: locations[], locationCities[], locationCountries[], locationCount, overallOfficials[]
• Results: hasResults
• Derived: studyUrl, recordType, scrapedAt

Input

Example: actively recruiting Phase 3 cancer trials in the US

{
"mode":"byCondition",
"conditionQuery":"breast cancer",
"status":"RECRUITING",
"phases":["PHASE3"],
"country":"United States",
"maxItems":200
}

Example: lookup by NCT IDs

{
"mode":"byNctIds",
"nctIds":["NCT04280705","NCT03695107","NCT04611802"]
}

Example: every metformin trial since 2020 with results posted

{
"mode":"byIntervention",
"interventionQuery":"metformin",
"startDateFrom":"2020",
"hasResults":true,
"maxItems":500
}

Use cases

• Pharmaceutical intelligence — track competitive trials by drug or sponsor
• Clinical research — discover trials matching a specific patient profile
• Health-tech startups — surface relevant trials by condition or geography
• Academic research — bulk-export the trial landscape for a disease
• Regulatory analysts — monitor FDA-regulated trials by status and phase
• Patient advocacy groups — find recruiting studies for rare diseases
• Biostatistics — feed structured trial metadata into meta-analysis pipelines

FAQ

What is ClinicalTrials.gov? The world's largest publicly accessible registry of clinical trials, run by the US National Library of Medicine (NIH). It contains over half a million studies from 220+ countries, with information sourced from trial sponsors and investigators. See clinicaltrials.gov.

Do I need an account or API key? No. The v2 REST API is fully public and free.

How fresh is the data? Trial sponsors submit updates continuously; ClinicalTrials.gov re-indexes the API in near-real-time. Most records are updated within hours of sponsor submission.

What's an NCT ID? A unique 11-character identifier (e.g., NCT04280705) assigned to every registered trial. Each NCT ID maps to one study record.

What's the difference between studyType values? INTERVENTIONAL = traditional clinical trial with an assigned treatment; OBSERVATIONAL = researchers observe but don't assign treatment; EXPANDED_ACCESS = compassionate-use programs outside of a clinical trial.

What do the phase labels mean? EARLY_PHASE1 and PHASE1 = first-in-human safety; PHASE2 = efficacy + dosing; PHASE3 = large-scale comparison vs. standard of care; PHASE4 = post-marketing surveillance. NA = not applicable (e.g., observational studies, device trials).

Why are some date fields like 2024-04 (no day) instead of 2024-04-15? Some sponsors register their trials with month-precision dates. The actor preserves whatever precision the upstream record has.

What's the difference between startDate and studyFirstPostDate? startDate is when participant enrollment begins; studyFirstPostDate is when the trial was first registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.

How are locations structured? Each trial may run at multiple sites. The actor emits a flat locations[] array (with facility, city, state, zip, country, lat/lon) plus derived locationCountries[], locationCities[], and locationCount for quick filtering and aggregation.

Can I filter by multiple phases at once? Yes — phases is an array. Selecting ["PHASE2", "PHASE3"] returns trials in either phase (server-side OR).

What if a study has no results posted yet? The hasResults field will be absent or false. Use hasResults: true in input to keep only studies with posted results.

Are NCT-ID lookups deduplicated? Yes — duplicate IDs in the input list are silently merged.

Does this actor respect ClinicalTrials.gov's terms? Yes. The actor sends a polite User-Agent header with a contact email, includes small inter-request delays, and uses the official public REST API. No bulk data dumps are produced — only the data the user explicitly queries.