@pipeworx/swissmedic

Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp — every tool in the catalog, including @pipeworx/swissmedic’s. Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 4

Swissmedic’s authorised human medicines register (Switzerland) — the “Zugelassene Arzneimittel HAM” list: every authorised product and each of its authorised dosage strengths, with the marketing-authorisation holder, medicine category, dispensing category (prescription tier) and authorisation dates. Keyless.

Tools

• swissmedic_search(query?, holder?, category?, dispensing_category?, limit?, offset?) — free-text/filtered search with real offset+limit pagination and a total_matches count. Answers “is X authorised in Switzerland”, “who holds the Swiss authorisation for X”, “what dispensing category is X in”.
• swissmedic_product(name) — every authorised dosage strength for one product by name (exact match preferred, falls back to substring with match_type marked). The export carries no indication text and no per-product URL, so this returns the authoritative Swissmedic download instead.
• swissmedic_recent_changes(since) — products first authorised, or with a dosage strength newly authorised, since a date — a real signal from the source’s own date columns.
• swissmedic_dataset_info() — the authoritative bulk-download URL, source page, row count, and the full lists of distinct medicine categories and dispensing categories used by the filters.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://www.swissmedic.ch/dam/swissmedic/en/dokumente/internetlisten/zugelassene_arzneimittel_ham_ind.xlsx.download.xlsx/Zugelassene_Arzneimittel_HAM.xlsx — the authorised human medicines XLSX, linked from swissmedic.ch’s “Listen und Verzeichnisse” page. Verified live 2026-09-25: HTTP 200, 1,005,371 bytes, 11,086 data rows. Swissmedic states the lists are “updated monthly” — there is no finer-grained cadence published.

This pack fetches EMA-sized data, not ema-article57-sized data — and that difference decides the architecture

The file is ~1 MB compressed, ~4.8 MB of sheet XML. That is the same size class the sibling ema-medicines pack already parses live per request without issue, and roughly 9x smaller than the file that made the ema-article57 pack build a local R2-backed copy instead (164,314 rows / 63 MB of sheet XML there, versus 11,086 rows / 4.8 MB here). So swissmedic fetches live, same pattern as ema-medicines: one parsed copy held per isolate for 12 hours (DATASET_TTL_MS) plus a 12-hour Cloudflare edge cache on top — Swissmedic’s own monthly update cadence makes anything shorter needless re-downloading of an unchanged file. If a refresh fails while an earlier copy is in hand, the earlier copy is served rather than an error.

Licence — this is a live proxy, not a mirror, so no separate reuse grant is needed

Swissmedic’s general Legal Notice is more restrictive-sounding than EMA’s (“downloading or copying content… requires written consent from the copyright holders” — a page written for the site broadly, not this specific public list). That question does not need resolving here: per the proxy-vs-mirror rule (mirror-needs-grant-proxy-does-not, CLAUDE.md), a pack that calls a public, keyless upstream live on each cache-miss is a client, not a publisher, and needs no explicit grant — only bulk-copying/mirroring the dataset would. This pack does the former (fetch-and-cache, same as ema-medicines), never the latter.

Schema — row 7 is the header, bilingual DE/FR source

Rows 1-6 are a title block (bilingual German/French, the same shape as most Swiss federal exports), row 7 is the header, rows 8+ are records. Ten columns: authorisation number, dosage-strength number, product name, marketing-authorisation holder, medicine category (“Heilmittelcode” — e.g. “Impfstoffe” = vaccines, “Blutprodukte” = blood products), dispensing category at dosage level, dispensing category at medicine level, first-authorisation date, dosage-authorisation date, validity duration (“unbegrenzt” = unlimited, for most rows in this export).

The two date columns are Excel serial dates (days since 1899-12-30, the Lotus-1-2-3-compatibility epoch Excel still carries) — converted to ISO YYYY-MM-DD on the way out (excelSerialToIso in src/index.ts). Verified against a known row: Vivotif’s first_authorisation_date serial converts to 1980-12-09, consistent with its real-world authorisation history.

There is no indication text and no per-product URL beyond the authorisation number. swissmedic_product’s response points to the authoritative Swissmedic download rather than paraphrasing an indication that is not in the data.

dispensing_category matches either column

Every product carries a dispensing category at the medicine level and, separately, one per dosage strength — they usually agree but are not guaranteed to. swissmedic_search’s dispensing_category filter matches a row if EITHER column equals the requested value, so a caller does not need to know which level Swissmedic happened to record a mismatch at. Distinct values observed live: A, A+, B, B/D, D, E.

swissmedic_recent_changes uses real dates, unlike ema-article57’s sibling tool

EMA’s Article 57 export (ema-article57 pack) carries no date column at all, so that pack’s recent_changes can only diff its own snapshots. This file has two real date columns, so swissmedic_recent_changes filters directly on first_authorisation_date/dosage_authorisation_date >= since — no snapshot history required. Verified live 2026-09-25: since: "2026-01-01" returned 384 real changes, including dosage-level re-authorisations from August 2026.

Reused parser

src/xlsx.ts is a copy of mcps/ema-medicines/src/xlsx.ts (the hand-rolled zip+XML reader) rather than a shared dependency — both files are small and a Worker pack shouldn’t pull in a shared xlsx-parsing package for what is, on each side, one regex-based scanner over one file shape. Keep them in sync by eye if the underlying approach ever needs to change; the lazy [^>]*? attribute match in CELL_RE is load-bearing (see the comment above it) and must not be “simplified” to greedy.

Tools

• swissmedic_search — Search Swissmedic’s authorised human medicines register (Switzerland) — every authorised product
• swissmedic_product — The full Swissmedic record(s) for one product by name — every authorised dosage strength, its own
• swissmedic_recent_changes — Products first authorised, or with a dosage strength newly authorised, in Switzerland since a given
• swissmedic_dataset_info — Dataset metadata: the authoritative Swissmedic bulk-download URL, the source page, current row