ClinicalTrials.gov¶
ClinicalTrials.gov is the default public registry for structured trial discovery, which makes it the most practical source when you need to move from a condition or biomarker to live recruiting studies quickly. It is the source most clinicians, coordinators, and patients already recognize, so its identifiers and status labels carry well across teams.
This page covers BioMCP's default trial backend. BioMCP also supports --source nci for NCI CTS, but that is a separate boundary with different access rules and should not be conflated with the default ClinicalTrials.gov path.
What BioMCP exposes¶
| Command | What BioMCP gets from this source | Integration note |
|---|---|---|
search trial |
Filtered trial search with condition, status, biomarker, and pagination controls | Default backend is ClinicalTrials.gov v2 |
get trial <nct_id> |
Trial summary card for a specific NCT record | Uses the default ClinicalTrials.gov detail path |
get trial <nct_id> eligibility |
Registry text, age, sex, healthy-subject state, and criteria | Section expansion from the same trial record |
get trial <nct_id> locations |
Facility and contact rows | Uses site data from the default backend |
get trial <nct_id> outcomes |
Primary and secondary outcome measures | Detail-section view |
get trial <nct_id> arms |
Study arms and interventions | Detail-section view |
get trial <nct_id> references |
Linked publications and citations when present | Detail-section view |
--json get trial <nct_id> documents |
Posted-document manifest and BioMCP retrieval handles | ClinicalTrials.gov only; provider URLs are not exposed as handles |
get trial <nct_id> document <filename> |
Exact advertised document bytes | 32 MiB response limit; shared outbound policy protects the CDN fetch |
Example commands¶
Returns a trial table with NCT ID, title, status, phase, and condition columns.
Returns a filtered trial table with the mutation echoed in the query summary.
Returns a trial card with the NCT heading, status, and condition context.
Returns a shared eligibility section with registry text, source age bounds, source-coded sex, and healthy-subject state. JSON keeps each fact discrete. Markdown presents a readable bounded view.
Returns a locations table with facility, city, country, status, and contact fields.
Location requests return a 20-site page by default. Use --offset and
--limit to select another page; an explicit Markdown page renders every site
selected by that limit and reports the shown count, total, offset, and limit.
When contacts and locations are requested together, top-level site contacts
belong only to sites on that page, while central contacts remain visible.
Contacts-only output remains complete.
In JSON, each location's contacts array contains every named site contact in
the order ClinicalTrials.gov provides them. The older contact_name,
contact_role, contact_phone, and contact_email fields remain first-contact
aliases for compatibility. Markdown keeps one row per site and renders all of
that site's contacts in the Contact cell, separated by <br>.
Standalone all JSON and batch JSON remain complete and unpaginated. For
readability, unpaginated all and batch Markdown show at most 20 sites, state
the display cap when it truncates the table, and limit top-level site contacts
to those displayed sites.
Runtime behavior¶
Posted-document retrieval validates the fixed ClinicalTrials.gov CDN HTTPS origin, port, DNS answers, and every redirect through BioMCP's shared outbound policy before contact. Loopback, private, link-local, metadata, non-HTTPS, and off-origin destinations are rejected with a sanitized source-unavailable error.
API access¶
No BioMCP API key required.
Official source¶
ClinicalTrials.gov is the official public registry and API surface behind BioMCP's default trial workflow.