@pipeworx/ema-medicines

European Medicines Agency medicines register — every medicine authorised for the EU market through the centralised procedure, plus the committee opinions still awaiting a European Commission decision — the EMA's herbal-medicine inventory (plant/botanical substances the Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products (HMPC) has assessed, with links to each herb's EU herbal monograph and assessment-report PDFs) — and seven sibling XLSX reports from the same download-medicine-data page: shortages, direct healthcare professional communications (DHPC), referrals, periodic safety update single assessments (PSUSA), orphan designations, paediatric investigation plans, and post-authorisation procedures.

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

Tools

• ema_recent_approvals(from?, to?, month?, category?, limit?) — new EU marketing authorisations in a date window. Answers "which drugs did the EMA approve in July 2026".
• ema_chmp_opinions(opinion_status?, since?, category?, include_decided?, limit?) — medicines the CHMP (human) or CVMP (veterinary) has recommended for or against approval and the Commission has not yet decided. Answers "what did the CHMP recommend this month".
• ema_medicine_search(query, status?, category?, orphan_only?, limit?) — search by brand name, INN / active substance, therapeutic area, indication text, ATC code or authorisation holder.
• ema_medicine(name) — the full published record for one medicine, by brand name or EMA product number.
• ema_recent_updates(since?, status?, category?, limit?) — register entries that changed most recently, including withdrawals and suspensions.
• herb_search(name?, latin?, botanical?, therapeutic_area?, status?, limit?) — search the EMA herbal-medicines inventory (plant/herb substances) by common name, Latin/botanical name, therapeutic area, or HMPC assessment status. Answers "which herbs has the EMA assessed for sleep disorders", "is there an EU herbal monograph for chamomile".
• herb(latin_name?, common_name?) — the full inventory record for one herb, plus monograph_url and assessment_report_url scraped (link extraction only) from the herb's EMA page. Answers "what is the EMA monograph link for valerian root".
• herb_monograph_status(latin) — HMPC assessment status, code/label, and the outcome of the European assessment for one herb by Latin name; explains why well-established-use vs traditional-use is NOT a field the register carries (see below).
• ema_shortages(query?, status?, since?, limit?) — EU medicine shortages: status (ongoing/resolved/discontinued), forms/strengths affected, alternatives availability, start-of-shortage date. The EU counterpart of the FDA shortages tool.
• ema_dhpc(query?, dhpc_type?, since?, category?, limit?) — Direct Healthcare Professional Communications: urgent EU-wide safety alerts to prescribers (adverse events, quality defects, shortages, safety signals).
• ema_referrals(query?, status?, safety_only?, category?, since?, limit?) — EU referral procedures (Article 31/20/107i and related) — safety and scientific reviews of a medicine or substance class.
• ema_psusa(query?, outcome?, since?, limit?) — Periodic Safety Update Report Single Assessments: the EU-wide joint pharmacovigilance review per active substance.
• ema_orphan_designations(query?, status?, since?, limit?) — EU orphan medicinal product designations for rare-disease treatments (Positive/Withdrawn/Expired/Negative).
• ema_pip(query?, decision_type?, since?, limit?) — Paediatric Investigation Plans: the agreed/waived plan for studying a medicine in children.
• ema_post_authorisation(query?, status?, category?, since?, limit?) — post-marketing variations and label-change activity for centrally authorised medicines.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/report/medicines-output-medicines-report_en.xlsx — the whole register as one XLSX, regenerated daily around 18:00 CET. Listed at https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/download-medicine-data alongside ten sibling reports (orphan designations, shortages, referrals, post-authorisation, DHPC, herbal, PSUSA, paediatric plans, MRLs).
• https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/report/medicines-output-herbal_medicines-report_en.xlsx — the herbal-medicines inventory, same file family, regenerated daily. 251 data rows collapse to 204 distinct herbs (a handful of rows repeat identically 2-4x in the sheet; herb_search/herb dedup on the per-herb page URL). Each row carries a per-herb page URL (https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/herbal/<latin-name-slug>) whose "Documents" section links the monograph and assessment-report PDFs that herb scrapes.
• Seven sibling reports, same file family and daily regeneration, listed on the same download page:
  • medicines-output-shortages-report_en.xlsx (ema_shortages)
  • medicines-output-dhpc-report_en.xlsx (ema_dhpc)
  • medicines-output-referrals-report_en.xlsx (ema_referrals)
  • medicines-output-periodic_safety_update_report_single_assessments-report_en.xlsx (ema_psusa) — note the filename is NOT medicines-output-psusa-report_en.xlsx; that guess 404s.
  • medicines-output-orphan_designations-report_en.xlsx (ema_orphan_designations)
  • medicines-output-paediatric_investigation_plans-report_en.xlsx (ema_pip)
  • medicines-output-post_authorisation-report_en.xlsx (ema_post_authorisation)
  • Deliberately not built: medicines-output-maximum_residue_limits-report_en.xlsx (veterinary residue limits, out of scope for this pack) and medicines-output-opinions_outside_eu-report_en.xlsx (niche Article 58 scientific opinions on non-EU products).

Things worth knowing before you touch this

• Sheet layout is not row 1. Sheet Medicine: row 1 is a provenance banner, rows 2–8 are blank, row 9 is the header (39 columns), rows 10+ are records. The header row uses inline strings, not shared strings — a parser that only resolves shared strings reads the header as blank.
• Self-closing cells are a trap. <c r="E10" s="1"/> is an empty cell. A greedy attribute match in the cell regex swallows the / and runs on to the next cell's </c>, silently shifting every value in the row by one column. src/xlsx.ts uses a lazy match for exactly this reason.
• Use Marketing authorisation date for "new approvals", not European Commission decision date. The Commission decision date also moves on post-authorisation variations — 80–141 rows a month — while genuine initial authorisations run 4–12 a month. Filtering on the wrong one answers a different question without looking wrong.
• The committees meet monthly, so "what did the CHMP recommend this month" lands on an empty window most of the time. When since filters everything out, ema_chmp_opinions returns the outstanding opinions and states in window_note that none were adopted in the window asked for — the question is about the pipeline, not the calendar.
• Opinion status alone does not mean "pending". Authorised and withdrawn products keep their historical opinion fields. Pending means Medicine status starts with Opinion; ema_chmp_opinions applies that by default and exposes include_decided to widen it.
• EMA rate-limits bursts and answers a 429 with ~40 KB of HTML rather than JSON — reproduced at five sequential requests. A per-call download is not viable, so the pack holds one parsed copy for six hours and the Cloudflare edge cache absorbs repeats on top of that. If a refresh fails while an earlier copy is in hand, the earlier copy is served rather than an error.
• Dates are DD/MM/YYYY upstream and are converted to ISO on the way out.
• data.europa.eu is not a route to this data. The EMA datasets are still listed there but frozen at modified: 2019-01-09, and every distribution URL 404s against the pre-redesign /sites/default/files/Medicines_output_*.xlsx path.
• The register covers the EU centralised procedure only — nationally authorised products are not in it.

The 7 sibling reports — things worth knowing