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NIH RePORTER — Grant Funding Search ($47B Portfolio)

Search the full NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORTER) database from Apify. Access 800,000+ active and historical NIH grant records — project titles, abstracts, award amounts, principal investigators, institutions, funding agencies, and fiscal years — all without an API key.

Why This Actor?

The National Institutes of Health distributes over $47 billion in research grants annually across 27 institutes and centers. Understanding where that money flows is critical intelligence for:

• Pharma business development teams scouting academic partners, licensing targets, and competitive research pipelines
• Biotech investors identifying early-stage research funded before IP is publicly visible
• Academic grant writers benchmarking award sizes, finding funding trends, and discovering peer PI activity
• Policy researchers and journalists tracking government spending priorities across disease areas
• AI/ML teams building biomedical knowledge graphs and literature pipelines

Until now, accessing this data at scale meant wrestling with NIH's web interface, limited exports, or manually paging through results. This actor wraps the official NIH RePORTER REST API v2 (api.reporter.nih.gov/v2) into a clean, paginated scraper that delivers structured JSON to your Apify dataset.

What the API Covers

The NIH RePORTER API indexes grants from all major NIH institutes:

• 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
• NHGRI — National Human Genome Research Institute
• NIDDK — National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
• NIA — National Institute on Aging
• NINDS — National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
• NCCIH — National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health

Grants include R01, R21, P01, U01, SBIR/STTR, and training awards. Records go back to fiscal year 1985 and are updated weekly.

Inputs

Output Format

Each grant is stored as one item in the Apify dataset:

{
"project_number":"5R01CA123456-03",
"title":"Novel mRNA Vaccine Platforms for Pancreatic Cancer",
"abstract":"We propose to develop and evaluate...",
"fiscal_year":2024,
"award_amount_usd":412500,
"funding_agency":"NCI",
"principal_investigators":["Jane Smith","Robert Chen"],
"institution":"JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY",
"institution_city":"Baltimore",
"institution_state":"MD",
"terms":"mRNA; Vaccine; Pancreatic Neoplasms; KRAS",
"url":"https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/5R01CA123456-03",
"scraped_at":"2024-11-15T09:22:11.000Z"
}

A summary record is appended at the end with total grant count and run timestamp.

Pricing

First 25 results are free on every Apify account — no charge until you exceed the free tier.

After the free tier: $6 per 1,000 grants (Pay-Per-Event billing). A 1,000-grant run costs $6.00. A 5,000-grant run costs $30.00. You are charged only for results actually delivered — if the API returns fewer results than requested, you pay only for what you received.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need an NIH API key? No. The NIH RePORTER API is fully public and does not require authentication. This actor works out of the box.

Q: How current is the data? NIH updates RePORTER weekly. You will typically see grants funded within the last 7–14 days. The API does not provide real-time data.

Q: Can I filter by multiple agencies at once? The current version accepts one agency code per run. To search across multiple agencies, run the actor once per agency and merge the datasets downstream, or leave the agency field blank to retrieve results from all agencies simultaneously.

Q: What is the difference between searchTerms and the agency filter? searchTerms performs a full-text search across project titles and MeSH/keyword terms. agency is an exact match on the funding institute abbreviation. Both filters are ANDed together when both are provided.

Q: Can I retrieve abstracts in bulk for NLP or AI training? Yes. The abstract field is returned for every grant record. Set maxResults up to 5,000 per run. For larger volumes, run multiple times with different searchTerms or fiscalYear filters and deduplicate by project_number.

Q: How does the free tier work across multiple runs? The 25 free results are tracked per Apify account using a persistent key-value store. Once exhausted, subsequent results are charged at the Pay-Per-Event rate. Free results do not reset between runs.

Q: What grant types are included? All NIH grant mechanisms are indexed: R01 (research project), R21 (exploratory), P01 (program project), U01 (cooperative agreement), SBIR (R43/R44), STTR (R41/R42), K awards (career development), T awards (training), and others. Use the searchTerms field with mechanism codes if you need to target a specific type.

Q: Is the award amount the total project cost or the direct cost? The award_amount_usd field reflects the total cost for that fiscal year (direct costs plus indirect/facilities costs), as reported by NIH RePORTER.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP agent

This actor is also a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server tool — call it directly from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCP-compatible AI agent. The agent only pays for results delivered (same pay-per-result model).

• Per-actor MCP endpoint: https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/nih-reporter-grants
• Full Mine Works MCP server (all tools): https://the-mine-works-mcp.hatchable.site/api/mcp

// Call this actor as a tool via apify-client (Node)
import{ ApifyClient }from'apify-client';
const client =newApifyClient({token:'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN'});
const run =await client.actor('themineworks/nih-reporter-grants').call({/* input from the table above */});
const{ items }=await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);