@pipeworx/china-pharma

Biotech and pharmaceutical licensing deals and drug approvals involving China, read out of SEC 8-K and HKEX disclosure announcements. Keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• china_licensing_deals(query?, since?, until?, limit?) — deals where a Chinese company out-licensed an asset to a Western partner, or a Western company licensed rights into Greater China. Returns both companies, the territory clause, upfront and milestone amounts, royalty language, and the filing it was announced in.
• nmpa_updates(section?, limit?) — official NMPA announcements in English: policy, guidance, import rules, clinical-trial guideline updates. Sections: news, drugs, devices, cosmetics. NOT the approvals register — see below.
• nmpa_drug_approvals(month? | since?/until?, query?, limit?) — specific drugs approved, conditionally approved, or given an expanded indication by NMPA, read out of HKEX (Hong Kong Exchange) disclosure filings. Returns the filing headline, company, approval date, a best-effort category, and the filing PDF.
• nmpa_drug_approval(id? | name?) — one approval record by the id from nmpa_drug_approvals, or by drug/company name search.
• csrc_penalties(since?, page?, limit?) — administrative penalty decisions (行政处罚决定书) from the CSRC, China's securities regulator, newest first from csrc.gov.cn's own JSON feed. Each row carries the decision number, publication date, the first named party, a memo excerpt with the remaining parties, and the link to the full decision. Securities enforcement — disclosure fraud, insider trading, audit failures — not drug regulation.

What nmpa_updates is not, and where the approvals actually come from

nmpa_updates is not the drug-approval register, and neither — contrary to what it looks like on a first read — is english.nmpa.gov.cn/drugs.html. Probing it live (2026-09-07) rather than trusting the page name: every section (drugs, news, policies, regulatoryinformation) is a paginated feed of administrative-policy notices ("Announcement on Strengthening Supervision of Contract Manufacturing", "Policy Interpretation of..."), the newest item under drugs is dated 2026-04-14 — five months stale against a September run — and not one entry across any section names a specific drug as approved. The Chinese-language NMPA site (all paths, not just /datasearch/, confirmed domain-wide this run) and CDE both still answer HTTP 412/202 with a 瑞数/Riverdata JS-obfuscation challenge to a plain non-Cloudflare client — the 2026-08-11 finding holds. Reading either needs a headless browser, which a stateless pack cannot be.

What actually carries approval events, keyless and current: any HKEX-listed Chinese biotech is required to disclose an NMPA approval as a same-day regulatory filing, and HKEXnews' public title-search JSON endpoint (titleSearchServlet.do) serves those without a key — the same trick china_licensing_deals already uses one exchange over (SEC 8-Ks instead of HKEX filings): the curated register isn't public, but the disclosure layer is. nmpa_drug_approvals and nmpa_drug_approval are built on that.

Traps

• titleSearchServlet.do ignores from/to when searchType=1 and title is set. Verified by requesting three different multi-month windows (Jan–Sep 2026, July 2026 only, a single day) and getting back the identical rolling set of the ~17 most-recent NMPA-titled filings every time. This pack fetches that one unbounded window and does its own date filtering client-side — since/until/month outside the reachable window return found: false with a hint explaining why, not a silently-empty "no approvals that month".
• Not every headline containing "approved" is a marketing approval. IND/clinical-trial clearances ("APPLICATION FOR CLINICAL TRIAL ... APPROVED BY NMPA"), application acceptances, and breakthrough-therapy designations all use approval-adjacent language. classifyApproval() excludes them by keyword (IND, clinical trial, accept(ed|ance), designation, clearance, submitted) before accepting a title as a marketing approval.
• name_cn is deliberately null. HKEXnews' English title search returns English-language headlines only; the paired Chinese-language disclosure is a different NEWS_ID and isn't reliably matchable without another lookup, and the PDFs aren't parsed. Left explicit rather than guessed.
• Coverage is HKEX-listed companies only. A China A-share-only company, or a Chinese biotech not separately listed in Hong Kong, will not appear even if NMPA approved its drug — stated in the response's scope_note.

Auth

None. SEC asks for a contactable User-Agent and 403s a generic one; the pack sends one.

Why SEC full-text and not a deal database

Deal databases (Citeline, Evaluate, Cortellis, DealForma) are all subscription products. But any US-listed party to a licensing deal announces it in an 8-K, and the press-release exhibit contains the counterparty, the territory and the money — so the announcement layer is public even though the curated database is not.

The scoping is the whole trick. "license agreement" AND "China" returns Yum China and YUM Brands ahead of any biotech, because fast-food franchising uses the same words. Requiring deal vocabulary instead — "upfront payment" AND "milestone" AND "China" — returned 24 filings over three months, every one of them a pharma company. The domain filter is the DEAL language, not the word "pharma".

Known limits, stated because they change what the answer means

• Only deals with an SEC-filing party. A purely China-to-Japan or China-to-EU deal between two companies with no US listing is never announced here and will be missing. The response says so in coverage_note.
• Deal terms are extracted from prose, not from a structured field. Amounts appear only when the release states them; a release saying "an undisclosed upfront" yields no number, and the field is omitted rather than guessed. A figure without a scale word (a bare $1) is deliberately rejected — no licensing deal is denominated in single dollars, and reporting one would be a wrong number.
• Bodies are opened for the first 8 filings per call. Beyond that the deal is listed with its filing URL and a note; narrow the window or use query to bring it into range.

CSRC penalties: what the feed does and does not carry

csrc_penalties reads the searchList JSON endpoint behind csrc.gov.cn/csrc/c101928/common_list.shtml (channel 28de6b87eda140cb93de4dd10d11867d, 行政处罚). Unlike NMPA's Chinese site, this endpoint carries no JS-challenge WAF — a plain request with a Referer header answers 200 (verified 2026-09-07). Every decision is titled with the regulator's fixed boilerplate, so the useful fields are parsed from memo: the decision number (〔2026〕42号) and the 当事人 (named parties) block. The linked content.shtml pages are HTML prose and are deliberately not fetched — the tool is a dated feed with links, not a parsed penalty database. _rangeTimeGte filters server-side but is loose at the day boundary (a since=2026-08-01 request came back with a 2026-07-31 row), so since is re-applied client-side to the returned rows.

Data sources

• china_licensing_deals: https://efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index (EDGAR full-text search, 8-K forms) and the filing bodies under https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/.
• nmpa_updates: https://english.nmpa.gov.cn/ (news, drugs, medicaldevices, cosmetics sections).
• nmpa_drug_approvals / nmpa_drug_approval: https://www1.hkexnews.hk/search/titleSearchServlet.do (HKEXnews public title search) and the linked filing PDFs under https://www1.hkexnews.hk/.
• csrc_penalties: https://www.csrc.gov.cn/searchList/28de6b87eda140cb93de4dd10d11867d (the 行政处罚 channel's JSON list endpoint).

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "china-pharma": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-pharma/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-pharma/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/china_licensing_deals \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"since":"2026-06-01","limit":10}'