@pipeworx/china-pharma

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-pharma/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 2

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

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.

What the NMPA tool is not

It is not the drug-approval register. The Chinese-language NMPA site and CDE both sit behind a commercial JS-obfuscation WAF (瑞数/Riverdata) that answers 412/202 with a challenge page to every request — verified 2026-08-11 from a plain non-Cloudflare client, so this is not the CF-egress problem china-stocks hit; it fails everywhere. Reading it needs a headless browser, which a stateless pack cannot be.

The English mirror carries no challenge at all and publishes the regulator’s own announcements. So this pack answers “what has NMPA announced or changed” and cannot answer “which drugs did NMPA approve last week”. The response says so in scope_note rather than leaving the caller to infer it.

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.

Data source

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/.

Tools

• china_licensing_deals — Biotech and pharmaceutical licensing deals involving China — a Chinese company out-licensing a drug to a Western partner, or a Western company licensing rights INTO Greater China. Returns the two comp
• nmpa_updates — Official announcements from China’s drug regulator, the NMPA (National Medical Products Administration) — regulatory policy changes, guidance documents, import rules, clinical-trial guideline updates