Nihr

What Nihr does

Nihr provides MCP access to UK National Institute for Health and Care Research award data. It covers research and training awards, including funded organisations, programmes, funding streams, project status, award amounts, dates, health categories, and named investigators or co-applicants.

The data comes primarily from the NIHR Opendatasoft portal and links to public award records on fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk. The integration is independent and unofficial, and it does not require an NIHR API key or account.

How it works

A hosted MCP connection uses the Pipeworx endpoint at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nihr/mcp. The pack-specific endpoint lists Nihr tools along with shared Pipeworx gateway tools. The full Pipeworx endpoint is also available when an agent needs direct access to all connected data packs.

For clients that do not use MCP, Pipeworx exposes HTTP tool endpoints under https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/. A local npm package, @pipeworx/mcp-nihr, acts as a stdio bridge and forwards requests to the same hosted gateway, so it still needs network access and has no offline mode.

Setup and configuration

Add the hosted endpoint to an MCP client that supports remote MCP connections:

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

For a local stdio connection, use:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nihr": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-nihr"]
    }
  }
}

The hosted connection is anonymous. The npm bridge permits anonymous use with a daily call cap; setting PIPEWORX_API_KEY enables an account-based quota. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 if the local bridge should also list shared Pipeworx tools such as routing and discovery utilities.

Tools and capabilities

• nihr_search_awards searches award titles and abstracts, with filters for programme, funding stream, status, organisation, amount, and start date. Results can be sorted by value or start date.
• nihr_get_award retrieves a complete award by project ID, including abstracts, value, dates, health coding, organisation location, funding link, and named holders with roles and ORCID identifiers.
• nihr_awards_by_organisation finds awards for an institution using substring matching and reports totals, average award size, matched name variants, and programme-level breakdowns.
• nihr_award_holders searches investigators and co-applicants by name, ORCID, or project ID and returns project IDs for further lookups.
• nihr_awards_by_programme groups awards by programme, funding stream, programme type, or programme stream, returning counts, values, averages, and date ranges. Calling it without filters can help discover programme names.

Limitations and notes

Project IDs use several formats, including values containing slashes. Correctly quoted and URL-encoded IDs are required when querying the underlying Opendatasoft API. The service also limits result requests to 100 records, although the pack handles that limit for its own requests.

Institution names may appear under different contracted names, so organisation queries use case-insensitive substring matching. Some awards have no programme type, and the summary awards dataset can combine multiple people in one holder field; the dedicated award-holders dataset is the more reliable per-person source.

The npm bridge requires network access. Anonymous bridge calls are capped at 50 per day, while a free Pipeworx account raises the limit to 200 calls per day. The integration is licensed under MIT.