#biomedical #dailymed #drug-labelling #literature

PubCrawl

PubCrawl plugin for OpenClaw — PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, and US/UK drug labelling tools. Built by PharmaTools.AI.

Install

Current stable OpenClaw · through 2026.10.4

openclaw plugins install clawhub:@nickjlamb/openclaw-pubcrawl

Updated OpenClaw · main/dev

openclaw plugins install @nickjlamb/openclaw-pubcrawl

Requires a build with ClawHub-default support.

PubCrawl — OpenClaw plugin

Biomedical research tools for OpenClaw agents: PubMed literature search, ClinicalTrials.gov, and US (FDA) / UK (eMC) drug labelling. Built by PharmaTools.AI.

This is the OpenClaw plugin build of the PubCrawl MCP server. It reuses the same data layer and exposes 13 agent-callable tools natively, so any OpenClaw agent can search the literature and drug labels without an external MCP process.

Tools

Tool	What it does
`search_pubmed`	Search PubMed; returns PMIDs, titles, authors, journals, DOIs
`get_abstract`	Structured abstract, keywords, MeSH terms, PMC ID for a PMID
`get_full_text`	Open-access full text from PubMed Central (sections, captions, ref count)
`find_related`	Related papers for a PMID, ranked by PubMed's neighbor score
`format_citation`	Format a PMID as APA, Vancouver, Harvard, or BibTeX
`trending_papers`	Recent papers on a topic, optionally high-impact journals only
`resolve_drug_name`	Brand ⇄ generic name, with drug class and indications (RxNorm/openFDA, no AI)
`get_uspi`	FDA US Prescribing Information via openFDA, cited to DailyMed (LOINC-coded sections)
`get_smpc`	UK/EU Summary of Product Characteristics from eMC
`compare_labels`	US PI vs UK SmPC side-by-side, with mapped sections
`search_by_indication`	Drugs approved for a condition, with US/UK availability
`search_trials`	Search ClinicalTrials.gov by condition, intervention, status, phase
`get_trial`	Full trial detail by NCT ID (eligibility, design, arms, outcomes, PMIDs)

All tools are read-only and hit public APIs (NCBI E-utilities, openFDA, DailyMed, eMC, RxNorm, ClinicalTrials.gov v2).

Install

bash

# From ClawHub (preferred)
openclaw plugins install clawhub:nickjlamb/openclaw-pubcrawl

# From npm
openclaw plugins install npm:@nickjlamb/openclaw-pubcrawl

# Local checkout (development)
openclaw plugins install --link ./openclaw-plugin

Restart the Gateway if it doesn't reload automatically:

bash

openclaw gateway restart
openclaw plugins inspect pubcrawl --runtime

Configuration

All tools work with no configuration. To raise the PubMed rate limit from 3 to 10 requests/second, add a free NCBI API key:

jsonc

{
  plugins: {
    entries: {
      pubcrawl: {
        config: { ncbiApiKey: "your-ncbi-key" },
      },
    },
  },
}

Build from source

Requires Node >= 22.

bash

npm install
npm run build              # tsc -> dist/
npm run plugin:build       # regenerate openclaw.plugin.json from the entry
npm run plugin:validate    # verify manifest matches the built entry

plugin:build and plugin:validate require the openclaw CLI (installed as a peer dependency). Always commit openclaw.plugin.json and package.json after running plugin:build.

Publish to ClawHub

bash

npm run build
npm run plugin:build
# Publish from this local folder (the plugin lives in a subfolder of the repo,
# so the owner/repo form won't find it).
clawhub package publish . --dry-run
clawhub package publish .

Relationship to the MCP server

Drug-label fetching/parsing (get_uspi, get_smpc, compare_labels) and name resolution (resolve_drug_name) come from the shared @pharmatools/drug-data package — the same engine the MCP server uses, so there's one source of truth for that logic.

The remaining src/lib/* modules (PubMed via NCBI E-utilities, ClinicalTrials.gov, searchByIndication/searchEmc listing for search_by_indication, and XML parsing) are still copied from the MCP server. Only the tool-registration layer differs: the MCP server uses McpServer.tool() with zod schemas; this plugin uses defineToolPlugin with TypeBox schemas. Keep those copied lib modules in sync when the upstream server changes.

License

MIT — built by PharmaTools.AI.